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21 May 2025

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Google AI Ultra is the new luxe AI subscription service for $250/mo
Let’s say you end the month with an extra $250 in your pocket. What do you do with it? You might spend it on a nice dinner out, perhaps with friends. A day trip. A spa treatment. Or maybe… AI? Google’s AI Ultra subscription—a recurring charge, mind you—is the newest way to flaunt your wealth. Announced at Google I/O today, Google says you can have all the best of what Google has on offer, from AI to storage, for “only” $249.99 per month. Google is also renaming its current $19.99-per-month AI Premium plan to “AI Pro” and adding additional features, like access to Flow. “[The AI Ultra plan is] for people who want to be on the absolute cutting edge of AI, from Google,” said Josh Woodward, the vice president of Google Labs and Gemini. Although it’s only available to customers in the United States as of today, Google promises that it will be available to a total of 70 countries soon. Here’s what the AI subscription buys you: Gemini: The AI Ultra subscription will deliver the best of the Gemini app, with the “highest” usage limits for Deep Research, Veo 2 text-to-video access, and early access to Veo 3, which adds audio generation that’s synced with the video. You’ll also get access to the “Deep Think” option within Gemini 2.5 Pro. Gemini is also integrated into Gmail, Docs, Vids, and more. Flow: Google is launching a new AI filmmaking tool that combines Veo, Imagen image generation, and Gemini. It’s designed for creating AI films, with editing capabilities built right in. Whisk: Another experimental technology, Whisk allows for quick image generation but also remixing. NotebookLM: Google is promising that you’ll again receive the highest usage limits and the most advanced models to use in your projects. Gemini in Chrome: Chrome is integrating Gemini and allowing it to use the context of the current page for queries. Project Mariner: Google’s agentic AI, which can be used to manage up to 10 tasks from a common dashboard. Google Drive: A massive 30TB of cloud storage. YouTube Premium Unfortunately, the sky-high price doesn’t come with a new Pixel phone.

WNBA investigating racial slurs by fans during game, source says
The WNBA is investigating racial comments directed toward Angel Reese by fans during the Chicago Sky’s loss to Caitlin Clark and the Fever at Indiana.

Adobe will charge you more for Creative Cloud in June, because AI (of course)
Do you want allegedly useful “artificial intelligence” features in your face in every single service and tool you use, constantly, unceasingly, and demanding you pay more for it? No? Too freakin’ bad, it’s coming anyway. The latest perpetrator is Adobe, who’s now raising the price of its priciest Creative Cloud plans next month and justifying it by bundling in a bunch of generative AI tools. The Creative Cloud All Apps plan is being renamed Creative Cloud Pro, because apparently tools that cost hundreds of dollars a year and aren’t available as full purchases aren’t for “professionals” unless they’re paying the maximum amount. If you’re in the US, Canada, or Mexico, and if you’re currently subscribed to All Apps, you’ll be moved over to the Pro plan starting on June 17th… with a price bump from $60 per month to $70 per month for standard, yearly-subscribed users in the US. Month-to-month prices will jump from the already-sky-high $90 per month to $105 per month. You can save a small amount on this by paying for a full year of access up front—that’s a whopping $780, which is a $120 increase over the previous yearly price for access to all Adobe apps. As usual, students and teachers qualify for discounts, using Aristotle’s “get ’em hooked while young” approach. Users will have the option to continue with their existing level of access, renamed from Creative Cloud All Apps to Creative Cloud Standard, for $55 per month on a yearly contract (or $82.49 month-to-month, $600 per year prepaid). Those rates are actually slightly cheaper than the existing prices for the same level of access… but the new plan won’t be available to new users starting in June. I repeat: in order to get the Standard plan, you’ll need to be an existing subscriber. New users won’t have access to those lower prices, and you’ll need to manually change over to get the cheaper Standard plan. How can it be a “Standard” plan if Adobe doesn’t make it available to everyone? I don’t know. Third base. Adobe For the higher Pro prices, Adobe is offering “full access” to the premium online versions of Photoshop, Lightroom, Illustrator, Acrobat, and Fresco—even at $55 a month, you’ll be stuck with the free web versions of everything except Acrobat. Pro also offers 4,000 credits a month for “up to 40 5-second [AI-generated] videos” or 14 minutes of translated video and audio, plus unlimited generative image and vector tools. Standard users get only 25 credits a month for Generative Fill, etc. As The Verge notes, initial reactions from Adobe customers are scathing. Microsoft, Google, and Canva all got similar rebukes as they’ve tried to force expensive and allegedly useful AI upgrades on their users. More than one poster on the After Effects subreddit has implied that they’ll continue using Adobe’s programs without paying for them. Ahem-hem. Adobe offers several plans below the All Apps/Pro level that don’t include access to dozens of programs, and they don’t appear to be changing at the moment. There’s also no indication that the new plans will be spreading beyond North America, at least for the time being. But speaking as someone who’s pass the two-decade mark as a Photoshop user, if you’re looking for less pricey, less exploitative options, you might want to look right here.