The battle heats up! After revealing ChatGPT training data last week, Google launches Gemini, its new AI model this week. Will it take down GPT-4?

As discussed by The Verge (Google launches Gemini, the AI model it hopes will take down GPT-4, written by David Pierce and available here), Gemini is Google’s latest large language model, which Google CEO Sundar Pichai first teased at the I/O developer conference in June and is now launching to the public. To hear Pichai and Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis describe it, it’s a huge leap forward in an AI model that will ultimately affect practically all of Google’s products. “One of the powerful things about this moment,” Pichai says, “is you can work on one underlying technology and make it better and it immediately flows across our products.”

Gemini is more than a single AI model. There’s a lighter version called Gemini Nano that is meant to be run natively and offline on Android devices. There’s a beefier version called Gemini Pro that will soon power lots of Google AI services and is the backbone of Bard starting today. And there’s an even more capable model called Gemini Ultra that is the most powerful LLM Google has yet created and seems to be mostly designed for data centers and enterprise applications.

Google is launching the model in a few ways right now: Bard is now powered by Gemini Pro, and Pixel 8 Pro users will get a few new features thanks to Gemini Nano. (Gemini Ultra is coming next year.) Developers and enterprise customers will be able to access Gemini Pro through Google Generative AI Studio or Vertex AI in Google Cloud starting on December 13th. Gemini is only available in English for now, with other languages evidently coming soon. But Pichai says the model will eventually be integrated into Google’s search engine, its ad products, the Chrome browser, and more, all over the world.

So, how does it stack up to GPT-4? According to Google, it stacks up very well. “We’ve done a very thorough analysis of the systems side by side, and the benchmarking,” Hassabis says. Google ran 32 well-established benchmarks comparing the two models, from broad overall tests like the Multi-task Language Understanding benchmark to one that compares two models’ ability to generate Python code. “I think we’re substantially ahead on 30 out of 32” of those benchmarks, Hassabis says, with a bit of a smile on his face. “Some of them are very narrow. Some of them are larger.”

Here are the results of Text benchmarking:

Not everybody is impressed. Melissa Heikkilä & Will Douglas Heaven of MIT Technology Review wrote: “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.”

One key difference between Gemini and other AI models is its inherent multimodal capabilities. As Google says in their announcement: “We designed Gemini to be natively multimodal, pre-trained from the start on different modalities. Then we fine-tuned it with additional multimodal data to further refine its effectiveness. This helps Gemini seamlessly understand and reason about all kinds of inputs from the ground up, far better than existing multimodal models — and its capabilities are state of the art in nearly every domain.”

Here are the results of Multimodal benchmarking:

And here is the full 60-page Gemini technical report, for those who really want to “geek out”! 😀

I’m sure we will start to see a lot about Gemini over the next few months and whether its capabilities are truly a step (or leap) forward, back or sideways. Now the question is: since Google launches Gemini, how does OpenAI respond? The chess game continues!

So, what do you think? What do you think of the announcement that Google launches Gemini? Will it soar to the moon, or crash down on Earth? See what I did there! 😉 Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

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