In summary
- Google launched Veo 2, Whisk and Image 3, expanding its free video, image and text generation capabilities on Gemini.
- xAI democratized Grok-2 and Aurora, offering advanced AI tools and integration with Elon Musk’s X platform at no cost.
- Competition between AI giants drives accessibility, while open source software remains a free and customizable alternative.
Lovers of free technology, you’re in luck! Google and xAI have revealed some pretty interesting updates to their AI offerings for free, matching and expanding on OpenAI’s recent democratization efforts.
Last week, OpenAI launched the latest salvo in the war for users’ hearts—and, ultimately, wallets—with its ambitious “12 Days of OpenAI” campaign, launching a series of powerful tools to the public. Campaign highlights include Sora, the firm’s next-generation text-to-video generator, “OpenAI o1” advanced reasoning model, and SearchGPT, a sophisticated web search integration.
Of these, both the search engine and the reasoning model are available for free users. While Sora requires a subscription to ChatGPT Plus.
Google responded with a broad series of ads to show that it still has a lot to offer. Competing directly against Sora, it announced Veo 2—the company’s latest video generation model—and registrations are now open for users to test the model through Google’s AI Test Kitchen.
“Veo creates videos with realistic motion and high-quality output, up to 4K. Explore different styles and find yours with extensive camera controls,” the company says. Clips can run for several minutes, outperforming most of the best video generators that run at 1080p resolution with shorter runtimes.
On December 16, Google also introduced Whisk—an experimental image creation tool that focuses on redesigning and using visual and pictographic inputs to produce visual outputs, through the Labs experimental platform. Unlike traditional models From text to image, Whisk introduces a novel “remix” approach where users can create new images primarily through visual references from their existing photo galleries, minimizing the need for detailed text prompts.
The company’s imaging capabilities have been further enhanced with the launch of Image 3—now available for free in the Google Gemini chatbot app. This new model brings improvements in detail rendering, diversity of styles and reduction of hallucinations. It also has text generation capabilities, which previous Google models lacked.
Also available for free is Gemini 2.0 Flash, an updated model that is available in both the Google Developer Console and the more polished, easier-to-use Gemini platform. Google also launched an advanced research assistant feature and gave its models the ability to process up to 1 million tokens for free in the developer console.
And some users have reported that an experimental version of Gemini 2.0 Advanced is also available for testing. “Advanced” is the most powerful model in the Gemini family, with “Flash” being a small, efficiency-oriented model, and “Pro” being a medium-sized model.
Grok-2 for the masses
Not to be left behind, Elon Musk’s xAI has entered the battle of the tech giants, making its own efforts to democratize access to advanced AI capabilities through the X platform (formerly known as Twitter).
The company has launched an upgraded version of its Grok-2 model, boasting substantial improvements in speed and capacity. The new iteration runs three times faster than its predecessor while offering greater accuracy, instruction following, and multilingual capabilities.
Additionally, last week, xAI began rolling out Grok to all X platform users for free. The integration extends beyond basic chat capabilities, introducing features such as web search with citations, allowing users to verify information and explore sources directly through the platform.
“Today we are excited to announce that we are starting to roll out this new version of Grok-2 to all users on X for free. As always, Premium and Premium+ users get higher usage limits and will be the first to access any new capacity in the future,” xAI noted in a blog post.
The company has also launched Aurora, its own imaging model, which has been integrated into Grok’s capabilities. The model offers lower image quality than Grok’s previous integration with Flux, but is good enough to provide photorealistic images with less cue sticking, but also less censorship.
To further support developers and businesses, xAI has announced significant price reductions for its API access, dropping fees to $2 per million inbound tokens and $10 per million outbound tokens.
Competition has caused rapid evolution in AI capabilities, with each company pushing the limits of what is possible while simultaneously making these tools more accessible. This democratization could lead to a new era of AI-powered creativity and productivity, as users gain access to tools that were previously available only to select developers or paying customers.
However, there is also a great option that some users may not be considering: open source AI. There are models good enough to compete against these giants, and they are freely available, completely customizable, and dramatically more transparent.
Genmo Mochi 1, Flux, Stable Diffusion, and Llama-3 are all great options that might meet your needs—and probably even exceed your expectations if you give them a chance. And they are also free.
Edited by Andrew Hayward
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