Gemini AI: Bigger, Better, Faster, Stronger?

Sunday - December 10 2023, 20:29 UTC - 11 months ago

Google DeepMind launched its new AI platform Gemini, claiming it outperforms OpenAI's GTP-4 on multiple levels. However, while it is a powerful tool for developers, many reports point out Gemini isn't necessarily revolutionary. Gemini is the AI equivalent of Apple's iPhone, a performance upgrade but not necessarily a revolutionary leap. It comes in three sizes, Ultra, Pro and Nano, and will be available to developers from December 13th, 2020.

Hype about Gemini, Google DeepMind’s long-rumored response to OpenAI’s GPT-4, has been building for months. Today the company finally revealed what it has been working on in secret all this time. Was the hype justified? Yes—and no.

Gemini is Google’s biggest AI launch yet—its push to take on competitors OpenAI and Microsoft in the race for AI supremacy. There is no doubt that the model is pitched as best-in-class across a wide range of capabilities—an "everything machine," as one observer puts it.

"The model is innately more capable," Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google and its parent company Alphabet, told MIT Technology Review. "It’s a platform. AI is a profound platform shift, bigger than web or mobile. And so it represents a big step for us." .

It’s a big step for Google, but not necessarily a giant leap for the field as a whole. Google DeepMind claims that Gemini outmatches GPT-4 on 30 out of 32 standard measures of performance. And yet the margins between them are thin. What Google DeepMind has done is pull AI’s best current capabilities into one powerful package. To judge from demos, it does many things very well—but few things that we haven’t seen before. For all the buzz about the next big thing, Gemini could be a sign that we’ve reached peak AI hype. At least for now.Chirag Shah, a professor at the University of Washington who specializes in online search, compares the launch to Apple’s introduction of a new iPhone every year. "Maybe we just have risen to a different threshold now, where this doesn’t impress us as much because we’ve just seen so much," he says.

Like GPT-4, Gemini is multimodal, meaning it is trained to handle multiple kinds of input: text, images, audio. It can combine these different formats to answer questions about everything from household chores to college math to economics.In a demo for journalists yesterday, Google showed Gemini’s ability to take an existing screenshot of a chart, analyze hundreds of pages of research with new data, and then update the chart with that new information. In another example, Gemini is shown pictures of an omelet cooking in a pan and asked (using speech, not text) if the omelet is cooked yet. "It’s not ready because the eggs are still runny," it replies.

Gemini also comes in three sizes: Ultra, Pro and Nano. Ultra is the full-powered version; Pro and Nano are tailored to applications that run with more limited computing resources. Nano is designed to run on devices, such as Google’s new Pixel phones. Developers and businesses will be able to access Gemini Pro starting December 13. Gemini Ultra, the most powerful model, will be available "early next year" following "extensive trust and safety checks," Google executives told reporters on a press call.

"I think of it as the Gemini era of models," Pichai told us. "This is how Google DeepMind is going to build and make progress on AI. So it will always represent the frontier of where we are making progress on AI technology." .

Bigger, better, faster, stronger? .

OpenAI’s most powerful model, GPT-4, is seen as the industry’s gold standard. While Google boasted that Gemini outperforms OpenAI’s previous moel on some measures, and that it is the most powerful tool for developers yet, many reports point out Gemini isn’t necessarily a revolutionary step.