Overnight, the fanciest AI models that once sat behind paywalls are being handed out to millions of people in India for free.

It feels like a digital coronation. This week, ChatGPT’s creator, OpenAI, announced its premium Go tier is now free for an entire year to all of India. It’s a generous gift, a digital key to a powerful kingdom.

This gift doesn’t arrive in a vacuum. It lands just after Perplexity AI offered its own Pro version for free through a partnership with Airtel. And not to be outdone, Google has teamed up with Jio to offer its advanced AI Pro plan free for 18 months, specifically targeting the 18-25 year old demographic first.

The giants of Silicon Valley are lining up at our digital doorstep, bearing gifts worth thousands of rupees. The message is clear: India, you are the chosen one.

But it does make you stop and ask, doesn’t it? Why us? Why all at once? And why… free?

The Generous Offer

The official line is one of empowerment and market access. We are, after all, the world’s largest population and its fastest-growing digital market. We are a nation of 1.4 billion people, with a sea of young, ambitious, tech-savvy minds who are already adopting AI faster than almost anywhere else on Earth.

These companies say they want to democratize access. They want to empower the Indian student, the developer, the small business owner. They see a nation poised to build the future, and they are generously providing the tools to do so.

It’s a compelling story. It’s also, almost certainly, not the whole story.

Because when the most valuable companies in the world all decide to give away their most valuable products for free to the same 1.4 billion people at the same time, it’s not just generosity. It’s a strategy.

The old Silicon Valley adage was, If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product. Your data was being sold to advertisers.

This is something new. This isn’t just about our data. It’s about our intellect.

In this new arrangement, are we the product? Or are we the unpaid workforce?

The Real Price: A Billion Trainers

Ask yourself: what does the company get when you test a new feature, upload a file for analysis, or rely on an AI for homework, code, or creative work? Beyond immediate usage metrics, every conversation is a training signal. User corrections, edge-case queries, slang, regional languages, and cultural references all help refine the models. Large-scale, unpaid human interaction is arguably the richest ingredient these firms need. The question then isn’t whether they value our input – of course they do – it’s whether we understand just how much of our free labor we are contributing in exchange for convenience.

Think about what an AI like ChatGPT or Gemini actually is. It’s not a static encyclopedia. It’s a learning system. And like any student, it learns through practice, conversation, and – most importantly – correction.

What does this student need to graduate from being a clever American assistant to a truly global intelligence? It needs to understand the world. And India is a classroom unlike any other.

We are not just a market. We are a dataset.

A dataset of 1.4 billion people who don’t just speak English. We speak Hinglish. We speak Thanglish, Kanglish, and Bonglish. We code-switch in the middle of a sentence, blending Hindi grammar with English vocabulary. We ask questions with a unique cultural context that a model trained on American Reddit forums could never understand.

The Digital Treadmill

They aren’t just giving us free access. They are giving it to the most active, most demanding, and most creative digital population on the planet. They are targeting the young, the developers, the knowledge workers who will push these tools to their absolute limits.

Is this empowerment, or is it the world’s largest, most sophisticated R&D experiment?

Are we the valued customer at the grand opening? Or are we the lab rats, running through a digital maze while the scientists on the other side of the glass take notes?

The cheese is a free premium subscription. The maze is the infinite canvas of our daily work, our school projects, and our personal curiosities. And the notes are the terabytes of training data we provide, making their product smarter, more capable, and ultimately, more valuable.

This isn’t a secret. The search results for why India are full of corporate buzzwords that mean exactly this: we are the proving ground, the testing ground for diverse data and anomaly detection. They need us to make their AI work globally.

The Question We Must Ask

• First, treat free as an invitation to look closer: who owns the model, where is data processed, and what rights does the service reserve over your inputs.
• Second, be deliberate about what you feed to these services – sensitive personal information, client data, and proprietary work belong in guarded vaults, not casual prompts.
• Third, push for transparency: if corporate playbooks rely on mass user participation to improve models, then companies should be required to disclose how user data is used, anonymized, and retained, and to offer real controls that are easy for ordinary people to use.

As we all rush to claim our free year of AI-powered brilliance, we must do so with our eyes wide open. We are not just users. We are a resource. We are the trainers. We are the labor.

The gift has been given. The golden handshake is offered. The question we must now ask ourselves is not What can I do with this?

The real question is: What are they doing with me?

Google has announced that its AI chatbot Bard, which allows users to interact with various AI models and generate creative content, is rebranding as Gemini. The new name reflects the company’s most advanced family of AI models, which were previously known as Gemini Nano, Gemini Pro, and Gemini Ultra. Along with the name change, Google is also launching a new mobile app and a subscription plan for Gemini.

Sissie Hsiao, VP and General manager of Google Gemini Experiences said, since we launched Bard last year, people all over the world have used it to collaborate with AI in a completely new way — to prepare for job interviews, debug code, brainstorm new business ideas or, as we announced last week, create captivating images. Our mission with Bard has always been to give you direct access to our AI models, and Gemini represents our most capable family of models. To reflect this, Bard will now simply be known as Gemini.

Gemini is a chat mode of Google that lets users collaborate with AI in a conversational way. Users can ask Gemini to help them with tasks such as writing, coding, learning, brainstorming, or creating images. Gemini can also engage in casual chat, trivia, games, and jokes. Gemini uses different AI models to provide different levels of capabilities and features.

The Gemini app, which is available for Android and will soon come to iOS, allows users to access Gemini from their smartphones. The app has a simple and intuitive interface, where users can type or speak their prompts and see Gemini’s responses. The app also supports voice input and output, as well as text-to-speech and speech-to-text features. Users can also switch between different languages and models within the app.

The subscription plan, which is part of the Google One AI Premium Plan, gives users access to Gemini Advanced, which uses the Ultra 1.0 model. This is the largest and most capable AI model that Google has developed, and it can handle more complex and nuanced tasks than the Pro 1.0 model, which is available for free. Gemini Advanced can also understand the context from previous prompts better and have longer and more detailed conversations. The subscription plan costs $19.99 per month and also includes 2TB of storage and other benefits from Google One.

Google said that the rebranding and the new offerings are part of its mission to give users direct access to its AI models and to showcase its latest advancements in AI. The company also said that it will continue to improve Gemini and add new and exclusive features to Gemini Advanced, such as multimodal capabilities, interactive coding features, deeper data analysis capabilities, and more.

Gemini is available in over 40 languages and more than 230 countries and territories. Users can try Gemini for free on the web or download the app from the Google Play Store. Users can also sign up for a two-month trial of Gemini Advanced at no cost.