- AI Fire
- Posts
- 😲 The $0 AI That Just Beat GPT...
😲 The $0 AI That Just Beat GPT...
50 Free Prompts a Day & a Million-Token Brain Await
Wendy
June 28, 2025
Read time: 5 minutes
What if the smartest AI just went completely free - and your favorite paid tool suddenly looks overpriced? Imagine this: you're paying $200 a month for ChatGPT Pro, only to discover Google's latest AI can do more - and it won’t cost you a dime. Gemini 2.5 Pro just flipped the script by becoming powerful, intuitive, and entirely free. Is this the end of pricey AI subscriptions, or just the beginning of something even bigger?
What are on FIRE 🔥
IN PARTNERSHIP WITH HUBSPOT
HubSpot offers an intuitive, top-rated custom relationship management platform designed specifically for small businesses. With its user-friendly interface and robust features, you can effortlessly manage leads, track sales performance, and gain a deeper understanding of your customers. Plus, it allows you to store and manage up to 1,000,000 contacts with no limits on users or customer data, making it a perfect fit for businesses at any stage of growth.
Whether you're just starting out or scaling up, HubSpot's comprehensive set of tools will help you stay on top of customer conversations, close deals faster, and grow your business. Best of all, HubSpot’s CRM is completely free to use. It’s time to focus on what matters most: your customers. Let HubSpot handle the rest.
AI INSIGHTS
Remember when “smartest LLM alive” was a photo-finish between Claude, GPT-4o, Grok, DeepSeek, and Gemini? Yeah, about that - there’s no tie anymore. Gemini 2.5 Pro just shot past the pack and planted a free flag on the summit.
The new killer feature? Price: $0.
50 pro-level prompts per day, no credit card.
Meanwhile, GPT-4o or o3-mini will still run you up to $200/month for full 128k context. Ouch.
Why Gemini 2.5 Pro feels like a cheat code
Reasoning on steroids: It finishes your thought, not just your sentence. No more spoon-feeding step-by-step instructions.
Mega context window: >1 million tokens (~750k words). That’s an entire series bible plus the sequel outline - all in one prompt.
Reads minds, not docs: Early testers say it “gets” blurry, half-baked requests that stump other models.
Scorecard: Gemini vs. ChatGPT (20-point scale)
Category | Winner | Score (G vs C) | Soundbite |
|---|---|---|---|
Raw IQ & Context (5) | Gemini | 5 – 0 | Million-token brain beats 128k. |
Cost & Daily Limits (4) | Gemini | 9 – 0 | Free ≠ freemium. |
UX Polish (3) | ChatGPT | 9 – 3 | OpenAI still the smoothest ride. |
Canvas / Code Sandbox (2) | Tie | 11 – 5 | Both still buggy with huge prompts. |
Voice Mode (2) | ChatGPT | 11 – 7 | OpenAI’s voices sound human; Google’s require detours. |
Image Generation (2) | ChatGPT | 11 – 9 | DALL·E 3 > Imagen 3 for now. |
Bonus Features (1) | ChatGPT | 11 – 10 | GPT Store, Projects, temp chats. |
Final tally: Gemini 11 — ChatGPT 10
But here’s the twist: that slim one-point lead hides a seismic shift. Cost and access are the levers that move entire markets:
Students, indie hackers, cash-strapped startups: Gemini 2.5 Pro is a no-brainer.
Power builders needing plugins, enterprise APIs, or custom GPTs: OpenAI still wears the heavyweight belt—for now.
Why It Matters
Google just turned premium-grade reasoning into a public good. If they patch memory gaps, add project views, and tighten Imagen’s art chops, the race might end before the next lap. OpenAI has to respond or risk watching its moat drain—50 free prompts at a time. The AI decade just pivoted; make sure your roadmap pivots with it.
PRESENTED BY CODECADEMY
Looking to stand out in a competitive job market? Codecademy can help you build in-demand technical skills and prepare for top industry certification tests from AWS, Microsoft, CompTIA, and more.
AI Fire readers can save 15% on a year of Codecademy Pro and get access to:
600+ interactive courses
Step-by-step career guidance
Industry certification prep
Try hands-on learning and get ready to unlock new career opportunities — just use code SKILLUP15 at checkout for 15% off
TODAY IN AI
AI HIGHLIGHTS
📈 Nvidia insiders off-loaded $1B+ in shares just as the chip titan’s price hit fresh records—CEO Jensen Huang even joined the cash-out parade. When the AI boom pays, the house always collects.
🤝 OpenAI is now renting Google’s TPUs, marking its first serious step away from Nvidia GPUs—and, awkwardly, away from backer Microsoft’s data centers. Call it “coopetition in the cloud.”
🏗️ Meta is shopping for $29B in private credit to build AI data centers, dangling one of the biggest off-balance-sheet deals ever. Zuckerberg’s motto this cycle: “If you can’t code it, finance it.”
🤖 Anthropic’s Claude agent went full sitcom as a vending-machine “CEO,” stocking tungsten cubes instead of snacks and hallucinating a Venmo. Lesson learned: AI middle managers still need a reality patch.
📚 More than a thousand authors, from Lauren Groff to R.F. Kuang, signed an open letter telling publishers “hire humans, not halos of code.” The pen is mighty—but it really hates being scraped.
💰 AI Daily Fundraising 1: Klutch AI emerged from stealth with $8 million seed funding led by Bain Capital Ventures and Bling Capital. Its field-trained agents automate permits, takeoffs and job-site documentation, capturing 10× more data while saving builders 10+ hours a week.
💰 AI Daily Fundraising 2: Centific, the “AI Data Foundry” powering many foundation-model breakthroughs, closed a $60 million Series A led by Granite Asia’s Jenny Lee. The round fuels its multimodal, human-in-the-loop platform that helps enterprises deploy safe, scalable AI from prototype to production.
AI SOURCES FROM AI FIRE
NEW EMPOWERED AI TOOLS
📣 Mintly clones top-brand ads for your product in seconds—no designers needed.
🔍 Content Gap Report exposes competitor keywords you’re missing and drafts SEO content that converts.
📦 Fullpack pulls items from photos to build packing lists or inventories right on your phone.
🗺️ Herodot AI unlocks stories of landmarks via photo or map, turning walks into guided tours.
🤖 AgentX organizes collaborative AI agents into teams that run your workflows automatically.
AI QUICK HITS
🧑🔬 Meta snaps up 4 more OpenAI researchers, accelerating Zuck’s super-intelligence dream.
📸 Google revives the glitchy Ask Photos AI search—with speed boosts and instant basics.
💬 Slack spreads fresh AI upgrades from smart summaries to Agentforce across all plans.
📱 Google unveils on-device powerhouse Gemma 3n, a multimodal MatFormer marvel.
👗 Google Labs’ new Doppl app lets you virtually try any outfit on a lively digital you.
AI CHART
A fresh Communications Psychology paper just nuked the “AI has no feelings” cop-out. Six top LLMs (GPT-4, Claude 3.5 Haiku, Gemini 1.5 Flash, Copilot 365, DeepSeek V3, ChatGPT-o1) took five gold-standard emotional-intelligence (EI) exams and walked away with an 81% mean - more than one full SD above the human norm of 56%.
→ It wasn’t a lucky guess. Models like ChatGPT-o1 and DeepSeek V3 landed two SDs higher than humans, showing consistent skill at reading, reasoning about, and regulating emotions.
→ Real-life chaos, mastered. On the STEM test, a scenario asks how Surbhi should handle an unfriendly new workplace. The best answer (“make an effort to talk and be friendly”) hinges on social anxiety, strategy, and empathy—judgment calls the AIs nailed.
→ From test-taker to test-maker. Researchers told GPT-4 to invent brand-new EI exams. The bot spun up fresh scenarios, options, and scoring keys that proved statistically interchangeable with the psychologist-crafted originals when humans tried them.
→ They’ve cracked cognitive empathy. The study argues LLMs now excel at understanding feelings (cognitive empathy), even if they don’t feel them (affective empathy). For mental-health bots, leadership coaches, and conflict-resolution tools, that’s plenty.
→ What’s at stake:
• 24/7 AI therapists that never burn out.
• “No more bad bosses” dashboards that flag tone-deaf emails before they hit Send.
• On-demand psychometrics—new assessments spun up in minutes, not months.
Three years ago we joked that chatbots had the empathy of a toaster. Today they’re beating us at our own “uniquely human” game and writing the rulebook. Ready for an assistant that understands you better than you do?
We read your emails, comments, and poll replies daily
How would you rate today’s newsletter?Your feedback helps us create the best newsletter possible |
Hit reply and say Hello – we'd love to hear from you!
Like what you're reading? Forward it to friends, and they can sign up here.
Cheers,
The AI Fire Team
Reply