Galaxy AI fans just had their bubbles burst in a big way. Not too long ago, the company announced that all of the cool and amazing AI features we saw during Galaxy Unpacked will be available to use for free…. until the end of 2025. This sparked an uproar throughout the Galaxy Community, as there’s a lot of confusion surrounding this announcement. Well, Samsung is confident that people will pay for Galaxy AI features.
There are a few things to note. We are still nearly two years from the cutoff date, so anything could change in the intervening time. Also, we are still very much in the dark on a lot of details. All we know is that all the features will be free to use until the end of 2025. We have no idea how Samsung is going to eventually monetize its AI features. This leaves us all with questions that probably will not be answered until the end of 2025.
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Samsung believes that people would want to pay for Galaxy AI features
To be quite frank, we’re not sure that even Samsung knows what’s going to happen at this point. The company has been pretty hush-hush about this news, only reiterating its statement when asked for comment. However, a recent interview with the Economic Times shines a little bit of light on Samsung’s mentality.
TM Roh, the president of Samsung Telecommunications, said in a statement:
“According to our analysis, there are various needs for mobile AI. So, there will be consumers who will be satisfied with using the AI capabilities for free. Then there could also be customers who wish for even more powerful AI capabilities, and even pay for them. So, in the future decision making, we will take all these factors into consideration.”
What Samsung’s statement could mean
The statement brings a few things to the surface. For starters, as noted by DroidLife, Samsung could possibly be looking to charge for augmented AI capabilities while leaving many of the core AI features, the ones we’re seeing now, free for users. Maybe the paid Galaxy AI features will be powered by a more advanced AI model. That seems very feasible, but it’s speculation.
Another thing this statement reveals is that Samsung is still feeling this whole thing out. In the quote, we see the statement “…in the future decision making, we will take all these factors into consideration.”
It sounds like the company is not set in stone quite yet on its decision. This makes sense, as this is the first time Samsung has offered advanced generative AI features on its phones. The company doesn’t really have any data on how people are using Galaxy AI. At the time of writing this article, pre-orders are still shipping to users, and many of them won’t even land in hands until March.
So, the company doesn’t really have concrete user data on how people are using these features, which ones people are using the most, which ones people aren’t using, and so on. Samsung is going to have to take these two years to get the raw customer data and come up with a business plan for what it’s going to charge. So, only time will tell how Samsung is going to tell what the company is planning on doing.
2024-01-31 15:08:39