Google just released Gemini: It’s ‘most capable AI model’ yet

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Google launched “its largest and most capable artificial intelligence model” named Gemini on Wednesday.

The large language model – Gemini 1.0 was introduced in three different sizes:

• Gemini Ultra — our largest and most capable model for highly complex tasks.
• Gemini Pro — our best model for scaling across a wide range of tasks.
• Gemini Nano — our most efficient model for on-device tasks.

Google said the new model will be integrated into Bard as well as the latest Pixel 8 Pro smartphones.

“These are the first models of the Gemini era and the first realization of the vision we had when we formed Google DeepMind earlier this year. This new era of models represents one of the biggest science and engineering efforts we’ve undertaken as a company,” said Sundar Pichai, CEO, Alphabet. “I’m genuinely excited for what’s ahead, and for the opportunities Gemini will unlock for people everywhere.”

The result of large-scale collaborative efforts by teams across Google, including at Google Research, Gemini was built to be multimodal and hence can “generalise and seamlessly understand, operate across and combine different types of information including text, code, audio, image and video”.

Gemini Ultra

Gemini Ultra is the first model to outperform human experts on MMLU (massive multitask language understanding), which uses a combination of 57 subjects such as math, physics, history, law, medicine and ethics for testing both world knowledge and problem-solving abilities, the company said in a blog post Wednesday. It can supposedly understand nuance and reasoning in complex subjects.

The launch of Gemini comes eight months after the search giant launched Bard and one year after OpenAI launched ChatGPT on GPT-3.5.

US media reported Google executives saying that Gemini Pro outperformed GPT-3.5. While Gemini’s Ultra model outperformed GPT-4 in a few benchmarks, according to a white paper Google released Wednesday.

Accessing Gemini

A note said Google is already starting to experiment with Gemini for its search platform, “where it’s making Search Generative Experience (SGE) faster for users, with a 40 per cent reduction in latency in English in the US, alongside improvements in quality”.

Additionally, developers and enterprise customers will be able to access Gemini Pro via the Gemini API in Google AI Studio or Google Cloud Vertex AI starting December 13.

Android developers will also be able to build with Gemini Nano via AICore, a new system capability available in Android 14, starting on Pixel 8 Pro devices, reported various publications.