Google is allegedly nearing the release of its intended AI-powered GPT-4 competitor, Gemini.
As reported by The Information, Google has provided a small group of businesses access to Gemini, suggesting it could meet its mooted December 2023 release date. Reportedly, Google plans to make Gemini available to companies via its Google Cloud Vertex AI platform.
Billed as Google's flagship AI, the company has claimed that Gemini has five times greater computational power than GPT-4. Google is explicitly presenting Gemini as a direct competitor to OpenAI's ChatGPT-4 and is trained on Google's advanced TPUv5 chips, which can work with a remarkable 16,384 chips simultaneously.
Gemini is a series of large language models (LLMs) that can work chatbots, summarise text or create original text based on what users like to read, including email drafts or news stories. It also promises to help software developers write code.
While Google's claim that Gemini's computational power dwarfs GPT-4's remains unsubstantiated for now, the product has several differentiators that have already been confirmed.
Firstly, Gemini was designed and built with multimodal processing in mind. This means it can process images and text, and it has been suggested that it will also be able to generate context-sensitive images and texts in answers to prompts.
Sundar Pichai, Google CEO, recently stated:
While still early, we’re already seeing impressive multimodal capabilities not seen in prior models."
Another key differentiator is Google's availability of proprietary training data. Gemini can be trained across Google and Alphabet's wide-ranging portfolio of products, including YouTube, Google Search, Google Books and Google Scholar, potentially handing it an edge over ChatGPT-4 as it will likely make its answers more accurate and better-informed.
That wealth of training data, complemented by a (claimed) computational power that would dramatically speed up response times and the benefit of visualised answers, could accelerate Gemini as a market leader upon release — if it lives up to its hype.
Google and AI
Since Microsoft backed OpenAI's launch of ChatGPT last year, Google became conscious of the need to invest further in generative AI to keep up with its rivals' pace. Consequently, Google has several AI solutions to complement Gemini, even if they aren't receiving as much hype.
