The artificial intelligence race is in full swing, and Google plans to take the fight right back to Microsoft and its partners, OpenAI. The search giant has rebranded its Bard chatbot and Duet AI into Google Gemini. What happened to Bard, and why is it now Google Gemini? The Bard chatbot was running on its older PaLM (Pathways Language Model) until December last year when Google switched it to run on Gemini Pro. Then, on Thursday, around a year after it first debuted in the wake of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google retired its Bard chatbot and rebranded it as Gemini. Along with that, the company has also launched Gemini Ultra, a paid premium version of the chatbot that uses Google’s biggest and most advanced large language model. What is Google Gemini, and what does it do? You can think of Gemini as Google’s alternative to ChatGPT — it should be able to handle most tasks that you would give to OpenAI’s revolutionary chatbot. Google says that Gemini is multimodal. This should mean that the chatbot can take inputs in various formats — text, images, video, sound — and give an output in any of those formats. You can see how it works in the video below. If you have seen the video, the process of using Gemini’s multimodality seems much smoother and quicker than it actually is. But a lot of that can be attributed to the editing. Nonetheless, the chatbot’s capabilities are still quite impressive. You can read this Google for Developers blog post to see exactly how the video was made by engineers at the company. Where can I access Gemini? The Gemini large language model is already available to users of Search Generative Experiences, (SGE), which incorporates Gemini’s ability to “read” and summarise large amounts of material into the Google search experience. But SGE is only available to a small set of users who signed up for the waitlist on Search Labs, the Google platform for search-related experiences. But on Thursday, along with the rebranding of Bard, the company announced that it will be launching dedicated apps from Gemini on Android and iOS. Gemini will also be made available to Android users along with Google Assistant. What is the paid Gemini Advanced? Gemini Advanced is a paid tier of the chatbot that will give you access to Ultra 1.0, which Google claims is its largest and most capable AI model. The company claims that it was the most preferred chatbot compared to leading alternatives in blind evaluations with third-party raters. Google did not provide any additional details about how the tests were conducted, including whether ChatGPT was one of the alternatives. It will be available as part of the Google One AI Premium Plan for $19.99 a month. Apart from access to Gemini Advanced, the plan will also give you 2TB of storage and the ability to use Gemini in Docs, Slides, Sheets and other Google products. According to Google, Gemini Advanced should be more capable at complex tasks like coding, logical reasoning, following nuanced instructions and even collaborating on creative projects. Apart from having more detailed and longer conversations, it should also be able to understand contexts from previous prompts. The company goes so far as to say that Gemini Advanced can work as a personal tutor that creates step-by-step instructions, sample quizzes and back-and-forth discussions tailored to your learning style. Is Google Gemini better than OpenAI’s ChatGPT Google’s DeepMind claimed in a technical report that Gemini outdoes ChatGPT on various tests. The paper claims that it got 90.04 per cent on an MMLU (Massive Multitask Language Understanding) benchmark test, compared to a human expert’s performance of 89.8 per cent and ChatGPT’s high of 86.4 per cent. Let’s ask Gemini itself. “I can't objectively say whether I'm "better" than ChatGPT, as that depends on your specific needs and preferences. Both ChatGPT and I are large language models with distinct strengths and weaknesses. Ultimately, the "better" option depends on what you need the model to do. If you need a tool for creative writing or casual conversation, ChatGPT might be a better choice. If you need a factual and accurate assistant for research or complex tasks, I might be a better fit,” said Gemini when asked if it was better. There is only one way to see whether ChatGPT or Gemini is better for you — give both the chatbots the same kind of task you would normally need done and see which one does it better. Repeat and rinse with other tasks before you form a better picture.
