BlockBeats News, May 20th: Amid intensifying competition in the field of artificial intelligence, Google directly "lifted competition restrictions" at its I/O Developer Conference, openly challenging OpenAI and Anthropic in AI model pricing. To attract software developers and enterprise clients to use its AI models, Google introduced lower prices along with a more powerful programming toolset.

At the same time, the company launched a $100 per month entry-level AI Ultra subscription tier to bridge the gap between consumer-grade and professional-grade models; and reduced the price of the high-end AI Ultra subscription from $250 to $200. Unlike Anthropic's premium pricing strategy, Google CEO Sundar Pichai stated that Google's lower-priced models would offer most of the high-end security and programming capabilities at a lower cost.

Although Google's most powerful model has always been referred to as "Ultra," the company is now expanding capabilities to the more affordably priced "Flash" and "Pro" series.

The Google CEO mentioned that the monthly active users of Gemini AI applications have more than doubled in the past year, reaching over 9 billion person-times, with daily request volume growing by over 7 times. He added that the company now processes over 3.2 trillion AI tokens per month, a growth of about 7 times from a year ago's 480 trillion, and significantly higher than the May 2024 level of 9.7 trillion.