Google today announced Gemini, a multimodal large language model, and confirmed the AI model will be added to Search and Ads next year.
Gemini in Search. Gemini will become available in Search, Ads and other Google products in the coming months. Meanwhile, Google Search is already testing Gemini, which has reduced the latency of Search Generative Experience responses by 40% for English in the U.S. and led to other unspecified quality improvements, Google said.
How will Gemini change Search? Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis were asked this by Platformer. As usual, Google kept it vague, and mostly talked about SGE – not Search as a whole, which could be telling:
What is Google Gemini. Officially known as Gemini 1.0, it is a large language model that can work with all types of information – text, images, audio, video or code. Gemini brings Google competitively closer to OpenAI’s GPT model. Three “sizes” of Gemini were announced:
- Ultra, for highly complex tasks.
- Pro, Google’s “highest performing model” for a broad range of tasks.
- Nano, for on-device tasks (i.e., Android phones like Pixel).
Gemini in Bard. Google Bard now is powered by a “fine-tuned version” of Gemini Pro. This gives Bard more advanced reasoning, planning and understanding, Google said. Calling this Bard’s “biggest upgrade” since launch, it is now available in English in more than 170 countries, with plans to expand further in “the near future.”
Bard Advanced, a new version powered by Gemini Ultra, will also debut early next year, Google said. It’s unclear how much Bard Advanced will cost, if anything.
Google DeepMind also shared a report that found Gemini outperformed GPT-3.5 for six of eight industry benchmarks. But OpenAI has offered GPT-4 since March.
Why we care. Although Gemini is only being tested in Search, Google has confirmed it will be part of the Google Search experience soon. Also, if you’ve been using ChatGPT for any of your day-to-day tasks, you may want to check out the upgraded Bard to see whether Bard matches or outperforms the free version of ChatGPT, powered by GPT-3.5.
