SAN FRANCISCO: It has taken a year, but Google has finally delivered a coherent response to the surprise challenge to its dominance in artificial intelligence that came with the launch of ChatGPT.
This week’s release of Gemini, a family of large language models, will give it a stronger platform to fight back against both OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, and Microsoft, which has used OpenAI’s models to supercharge all its software and cloud services this year.
The question now is whether Gemini can make a meaningful difference to Google’s existing services – and, perhaps even more important, whether it can become a foundation for a new range of services that carry AI much deeper into everyday life.
With the three “flavours” of Gemini announced this week, Google is finally stamping its mark on a technology that its own researchers did much to pioneer, but which OpenAI’s ChatGPT carried into the mainstream.
The Pro version, for instance, is positioned squarely against OpenAI’s GPT-3.5, the model behind the free version of ChatGPT and the workhorse for many of the first generative AI applications from other companies that have hit the market this year.
The smaller Gemini Nano is matched against systems such as the smallest version of LLaMa 2, Facebook’s open-source model, making it capable of being run on a mobile device. Apple, as always, is taking a considered approach before bringing generative AI to the iPhone, but the appearance of Gemini on Google’s latest Pixel handset is a sign that it can’t afford to wait too long.
It is the top-of-the-line Gemini Ultra, due out early next year, that carries Google’s main hopes of matching or leapfrogging OpenAI’s GPT-4 in the race to turn generative AI into a more useful everyday tool. The company fell behind this year, but has some clear advantages that could help bring Gemini to a big market in 2024.
