Google launches Gemini, a new AI model touted to exceed ChatGPT, Bard and others

Tech giant Google has announced the launch of Gemini, which it describes as its largest and most capable AI model.

In a statement sent to Technext, the company says Gemini can efficiently run on everything from data centres to mobile devices. Google says the state-of-the-art capabilities of the new AI model will significantly enhance the way developers and enterprise customers build and scale with AI.

According to the CEO of Google and Alphabet, Sundar Pichai, every technology shift is an opportunity to advance scientific discovery, accelerate human progress, and improve lives. 

Also, Sundar says AI has the potential to create opportunities which will bring new waves of innovation, economic progress, and drive knowledge. These are the reasons why he and his team are excited to make AI helpful for everyone globally.

What to know about Google Gemini

Google describes Gemini as:

“Our most capable and general model yet, with state-of-the art performance across many leading benchmarks.”

The first version, Gemini 1.0, is optimized for different models which are: Ultra, Pro, and Nano. 

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Ultra is the largest and most capable for highly complex tasks, Pro is the model for scaling across a wide range of tasks, while Nano is an efficient model for on-device tasks.

The new AI model was built to be multimodal, which means it can generalize and seamlessly understand, operate across and combine different types of information including text, code, audio, image and video. Also, the model is reportedly Google’s most flexible model, which means it is able to efficiently run on everything from data centres to mobile devices. 

The AI software is designed to seamlessly understand and reason about all kinds of inputs. Also, Gemini 1.0’s sophisticated multimodal reasoning capabilities can help make sense of complex written and visual information. This makes it uniquely skilled at uncovering knowledge that can be difficult to discern amid vast amounts of data.

Additionally, the 1.0 version was trained to recognize and understand text, images, audio and more at the same time, therefore, it better understands nuanced information and can answer questions relating to complicated topics. This makes it especially good at explaining reasoning in complex subjects like math and physics. 

Ultimately, this first version can understand, explain and generate high-quality code in the world’s most popular programming languages, like Python, Java, C++ and Go. Its ability to work across languages and reason about complex information makes it one of the leading foundation models for coding in the world. 

Availability

Per the announcement, Gemini 1.0 is now rolling out across a range of Google products and platforms. From today, Bard will use a fine-tuned version of the Gemini Pro version for more advanced reasoning, planning, understanding and more. 

Gemini will be available in English in more than 170 countries and territories and Google plans to expand to different modalities and support new languages and locations soon.

Also, Google is bringing the new AI model to Pixel and it will be available in more Google products and services like Search, Ads, Chrome and Duet AI in the coming months. The tech giant says it’s already starting to experiment with Gemini in Search, where it’s making its Search Generative Experience (SGE) faster for users, with a 40% reduction in latency in English in the United States alongside improvements in quality.

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Ultimately, starting from December 13, developers and enterprise customers can access Gemini Pro via the Gemini API in Google AI Studio or Google Cloud Vertex AI. Also, Android developers will be able to build with Gemini Nano, Gemini’s model for on-device tasks, via AICore, a new system capability available in Android 14, starting on Pixel 8 Pro devices. 

Regarding Gemini Ultra, Google is currently completing trust and safety checks and further refining the model before making it broadly available.

As part of this process, Gemini Ultra will be made available to select customers, developers, partners and safety and responsibility experts for early experimentation and feedback before rolling it out to developers and enterprise customers early next year. 

You can read more about how Gemini works here.