Google has several cards up their sleeves...

What can we expect from Google’s Gemini?

Google have several cards up their sleeve on Generative AI:

1. They invented it!
2. Awesome AI resources
3. Google Search
4. Google Scholar
5. Google books
6. YouTube
7. Google Translate
8. Google Maps
9. Global reach, data centres and delivery
10. Above all they have DeepMind

 

Gemini is their big response to OpenAI and has a family of foundational models, at three sizes:

 

Ultra – professional version of Bard

Pro – through Bard and Google products
Nano (on device - mobile version)

 

An important word here is ‘multimodal’, as their model has been trained on and is capable of processing most media types, including text, images, video, audio and code. So far Generative AI has largely been a 'calculator for words'... but this lifts it into another realm. It is multimodal from the ground up (input not necessarily output). 

However, one must be careful in making the assumption that this moves it more towards how humans think. Our multimodality is quite different, especially the ways we deal with sight and sound. There is little crossover.

They make claims about “sophisticated reasoning and its ability to process complex information in different formats, also the analysis and extraction of data from research articles, being able to really distinguish the relevant from irrelevant. On benchmarking, it has already outperformed human specialists in MMLU (massive multitasking language comprehension on topics like math, history, law and ethics, at 90.0% against 86.4% of GPT-4.

 

This is all very exciting, as it shows how competition is accelerating progress. Google has taken a cautious approach by rolling out these products across next year. Despite their ability to read multimedia, the initial Gemini models will not – at least initially – produce images or videos.

Unlike OpenAI, they have an advertising business to protect and need to be careful. They know that the writing is on the generative wall for search. As usual, they are going for integration into products approach, a rising tide rather than a single flood. Seems wise. After a tumultuous year, we are entering a more stable product development phase. Google will not see any Board bun-fights. Although there will be some surprises in store for sure.

Google have a universal, global mission, to harness our cultural information and make it available to all. Year one was revolution, year two will be evolution.

Watch video here.