Google launches Gemini, its new AI model to compete with ChatGPT

Europe 1 with AFP 08:47, 07 December 2023

Google will begin rolling out Gemini, its new artificial intelligence (AI) model, on Wednesday that is supposed to allow it to better compete with OpenAI (the creator of ChatGPT) and Microsoft, consumer apps with computing capabilities for businesses. "It's our most consistent, most gifted and also the most general AI model," Eli Collins, a vice president at Google DeepMind, the California-based company's AI research lab, said in a press presentation.

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Gemini can "see"

He then released a video where a user shows objects, drawings, and videos to Gemini. The AI system verbally comments on what it "sees", identifies objects, plays music and answers questions requiring a certain degree of analysis, justifying its "reasoning". The new model is "multimedia from the start, it has sophisticated reasoning capabilities, and it can code at an advanced level," Collins said.

Since the launch of ChatGPT a year ago, the Silicon Valley giants have been engaged in a frantic race for so-called generative AI, which makes it possible to obtain texts, images or lines of code of a level equivalent to those produced by humans, with a simple query in everyday language.

Google, a leader in AI but caught off guard by the phenomenal success of ChatGPT, responded with its own chatbot, Bard. However, it all comes down to the models, the computer systems that underpin these applications. Gemini "is another step towards our vision of bringing you the best AI collaborator in the world," Sissie Hsiao, Google's vice president of Bard, said Wednesday.

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Bard needs to gain capacity on Wednesday

Bard is expected to gain capacity as of Wednesday, but still with requests written, and only in English. We'll have to wait until 2024 for the other functions and formats, such as advanced math problem-solving assistance. Less well-known than ChatGPT, Bard has the opportunity to try to regain ground on its rival, victim of its own success: in mid-November, overwhelmed by demand, OpenAI paused subscriptions to the paid version.

Google will also give its customers access to a first version of Gemini on December 13 in the cloud (remote computing). In this field, the internet giant is in direct competition with Microsoft, OpenAI's main investor and the world's number 2 cloud company, behind Amazon. The two U.S. groups spent the year adding generative AI tools to their respective software (search engine, office and productivity software, cloud platform, etc.).