For more than a year, Google has been racing to develop technology that could match ChatGPT, the revealing chatbot offered by OpenAI, a San Francisco artificial intelligence startup.
On Wednesday, the tech giant took another step in the ongoing race by launching a new version of its own chatbot, Google Bard. Available to English speakers in more than 170 territories and countries, including the United States, as of now, the updated bot is powered by a new artificial intelligence technology called Gemini, which the company has been developing since the beginning of the year.
“This is the beginning of the Gemini era,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in an interview. “It is the realization of the vision we had when we created Google DeepMind,” the company's artificial intelligence laboratory. He said Google would roll out three different versions of the technology across a wide range of products and services in the coming months.
Pichai and Demis Hassabis, who oversees Google DeepMind, said Gemini was more powerful than Google's previous chatbot technologies and could generate more precise responses and come closer to mimicking human reasoning in some situations.
“We are very pleased with the performance of Gemini,” said Dr. Hassabis.
When OpenAI took the world by storm with ai chatbot ChatGPT late last year, Google was caught off guard. The tech giant had spent years developing similar technology, but like other tech giants, most notably Meta, was reluctant to release technology that could generate biased, false or toxic information.
In March, Google launched its own chatbot, Bard, to mediocre reviews. A month later, the company announced that it had combined its two artificial intelligence laboratories (Google Brain and DeepMind), bringing together more than 2,000 researchers and engineers. And in May, at its flagship Google I/O conference, it announced that the new Google DeepMind lab had begun developing Gemini.
After founding Brain Lab in 2011, Google acquired DeepMind in 2014, paying $650 million for the London ai startup. DeepMind operated largely independently of Brain Lab and the rest of Google for a decade and even attempted to separate from the company in 2017. But as Google struggled to catch up with OpenAI, Pichai combined the two labs under Dr. Hassabis. a neuroscientist who co-founded DeepMind.
Google published benchmark results claiming that the most powerful version of Gemini outperformed OpenAI's latest technology, GPT-4, in several key areas. It is better at generating computer code than Google's previous technologies, Pichai said, and can more accurately summarize news articles and other text documents.
Gemini was also designed to analyze images and sounds, but those abilities won't be incorporated into the Bard chatbot until a later date.
Google has created three versions of Gemini with three different skill sets. The largest, Ultra, is designed to tackle complex tasks and will debut next year. Pro, the mid-tier offering, will roll out to numerous Google services starting Wednesday with the Bard chatbot. Nano, the smaller version, will power some features of the Pixel 8 Pro smartphone, such as summarizing audio recordings and offering suggested text responses on WhatsApp starting Wednesday.
Gemini is what scientists call a large language model, or LLM, a complex mathematical system that can learn skills by analyzing large amounts of data, including digital books, Wikipedia articles and online bulletin boards. By identifying patterns in all that text, an LLM learns to generate text on its own. That means you can write term papers, generate computer code, and even carry on a conversation.
With Gemini, Google has also trained the technology in digital images and sounds. It's what researchers call a “multimodal” system, meaning it can analyze and respond to both images and sounds. If you give him a math problem that involves lines, shapes, and other images, for example, he may respond much like a high school student would.
That part of the technology, however, won't be available to consumers until next year. Google also acknowledged that, like similar systems, Gemini is prone to errors. You can get the facts wrong or even “hallucinate” – make things up.
Google Cloud, which offers artificial intelligence and computing services to other companies, has been eager to offer Gemini to its customers as it competes for deals with OpenAI and Microsoft. After OpenAI briefly ousted CEO Sam Altman last month, leaving the company in limbo, Google Cloud created a migration plan in an attempt to win customers from its rival.
Customers could pay Google the same price as their current OpenAI rate and get cloud credits or discounts.
Google said cloud customers would have access to Gemini Pro (the mid-tier offering) on December 13. Pichai said some outsiders were now testing Gemini Ultra (the most powerful version of the technology).
Although Google has spent the last year racing to regain ai leadership from OpenAI, Pichai said there was enough room in the market for all ai vendors.
“It's very far from being a zero-sum game,” Pichai said. “We have a sense of excitement about what we are launching. We also realize that we are in the early days because we can see the progress we are making in the follow-up.”