Google has visibly accelerated AI development. At the same time, the company is unifying its activities under the “Gemini” brand. The ChatGPT competitor Google Bard is now called Google Gemini and the proprietary AI models are also called Gemini.
Until now, Google’s chatbot used the “Gemini Pro” AI model, but now “Gemini Ultra” is also available in its 1.0 version if you pay $20/month. This is roughly comparable to ChatGPT Plus and GPT-4, but only roughly, because the search engine combines this offer with its “Google One” subscription. This is why you also get, for example, 2 TB of cloud storage and other benefits. This means that anyone who already has Google One Premium for $9.99 a month pays an extra $10 a month for the best AI available. This should be a good selling point.
Like GPT-4, Gemini Ultra is “multimodal”, so it can process not only text, but also uploaded images, visit links, and create images with Google’s Imagen 2. You can find a comparison here.
Like Microsoft, Google is integrating the AI assistant into other services and products. One example is “Gemini for Google Workspace and Google Cloud”, formerly known as Duet AI. Gemini helps you write emails or summarize documents, for example.
Gemini can also be found in apps for Android smartphones and iPhones. Android users can even use Gemini as a replacement for Google Assistant. Click here to read a user report.
Last but not least, Google is previewing Gemini Pro version 1.5, which is said to be comparable in capabilities to the current Gemini Ultra and has a breathtakingly large context window of 1 million tokens. This value determines how much information the AI can view simultaneously. For comparison: OpenAI’s current top product GPT-4 Turbo manages 128,000 tokens, while Anthropic’s Claude has 200,000.
Such a large context window opens up new areas of application, as the AI can work with 10 hours of video or tens of thousands of lines of code at once. It is not known when Gemini 1.5 Pro will be presented to the general public.
Sources: Ars Technica, The Verge, TechCrunch, The Verge