Google brings free Gemini access to India's largest carrier (www.engadget.com)

Google has struck a partnership with Reliance Intelligence to offer Google AI Pro free for 18 months to Jio Unlimited 5G subscribers in India, initially for users aged 18–25 and later rolling out to all eligible plans via the MyJio app. The package includes access to Gemini 2.5 Pro (Google’s top-tier model), expanded NotebookLM capabilities, boosted quotas for multimodal generators Nano Banana (images) and Veo 3.1 (video), plus 2TB of Google cloud storage—together valued at roughly ₹35,100 (~$396) per user. The deal builds on Google’s existing 7.7% stake in Jio and is positioned as a major user-acquisition play in India. For the AI/ML community this is significant because it accelerates large-scale, real-world exposure of advanced multimodal models to a massive user base, likely producing rich feedback signals and usage data that can inform future product and model iterations. It also ratchets up competitive pressure in India’s burgeoning AI market—Parallels include Perplexity’s Airtel tie-up and OpenAI’s India-first ChatGPT Go—potentially driving faster localization, infrastructure demand (edge/cloud compute, storage), and regulatory scrutiny around data, privacy, and model behavior. For researchers and developers, wider public access to Gemini 2.5 Pro and multimodal tools could shift benchmarks, prompt new applications, and change expectations for on-device and cloud-assisted AI services.