You won’t need to pay for Samsung’s latest Galaxy S24 AI features—at least not for another two years. Samsung’s head mobile exec confirmed that users might be asked to pay for more premium AI features in two years’ time, though not even the company itself knows what a paid version of Galaxy AI will look like.
After Samsung first shared details about its flagship Galaxy S24 phones earlier this month, the internet quickly drilled down on some of the fine print text on the cellular’s product page. Most notably, Samsung specified it would keep its AI cost-free, but only until the end of 2025. The company didn’t mention specifics or share any plans, and the fine print text left a lot up to interpretation.
Samsung’s president of its mobile division, T.M. Roh, confirmed with ET Telecom (via Android Authority) that the South Korean tech giant has effectively set the limit of fully free AI until the end of 2025. While the company doesn’t have definitive plans for what happens after that, Roh said there are “various needs for mobile AI.”
Some customers would be fine with free AI, in whatever form that takes in the year after next. Samsung may then try to offer certain AI features to customers who are more willing to pay for these features.
“There could also be customers who wish for even more powerful AI capabilities and even pay for them,” the Samsung president said. “So, in future decision-making, we will take all these factors into consideration.”
So we’re going to have to wait and see what additional AI features could come with next year’s S25 release, but that doesn’t mean we won’t eventually find the current AI features we’ve gotten used to stuck behind a paywall by the time the S26 rolls out.
Samsung would not be alone in promoting a premium subscription for more capable AI. You can pay OpenAI $20 for ChatGPT Plus to access GPT-4, custom chatbots, and its DALL-E 3 model directly from the webpage or app. Microsoft is also promoting a $20-per-month Copilot Pro subscription that’s supposed to run across all your devices, including PCs and smartphones.
What’s available on the S24, such as Google’s newfangled Circle to Search, are already pretty handy, but many of those features may not be handled fully on-device. Features like Live Translate require an internet connection to work, so it’s clear that not all of the new AI features are being run completely on-device. The more powerful an AI model is, the more it costs to run, especially at the scale Samsung and other phone makers are trying to establish. Eventually, those costs will inevitably move to the consumer.
