The Morning After: Google’s Gemini is the company’s answer to ChatGPT

Google officially introduced its most capable large language model to date, Gemini. CEO Sundar Pichai said it’s the first of “a new generation of AI models, inspired by the way people understand and interact with the world.” Of course, it’s all very complex, but Google’s multimillion-dollar investment in AI has created a model more flexible than anything before it. Let’s break it down.

The system has been developed from the ground up as an integrated multimodal AI. As Engadget’s Andrew Tarantola puts it, “think of many foundational AI models as groups of smaller models all stacked together.” Gemini is trained to seamlessly understand and reason on all kinds of inputs, and this should make it pretty capable in the face of complex coding requests and even physics problems.

Gemini is being ‘made’ into three sizes: Nano, Pro and Ultra. Nano is on-device, and Pro will fold into Google’s chatbot, Bard. The improved Bard chatbot will be available in the same 170 countries and territories as the existing service. Gemini Pro apparently outscored the earlier model, which initially powered ChatGPT, called GPT-3.5, on six of eight AI benchmarks. However, there are no comparisons yet between OpenAI’s dominant chatbot running on GPT-4 …read more