Google’s AI edge set to catch rivals

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Bard, in English across 170 countries including India. However, while claiming that the new AI model “exceeds state-of-the-art" AI models, Google executives did not reveal the size of the model in terms of the number of data parameters, or how it compares with OpenAI’s Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT)-4 model that underpins the latest versions of ChatGPT, at a media roundtable ahead of the announcement. Eli Collins, vice-president of product at Google DeepMind, said Gemini is “more efficient" than previous AI models developed by Google.

However, while Google said Gemini outperforms OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 during the roundtable, they did not offer a reference as to whether the model would outperform GPT-4 as well. Gemini Nano will be the smallest, lightest version of the AI model, and will be used in localized applications. A version of Gemini Nano was piloted Wednesday through Google’s newest smartphone, Pixel 8 Pro, and is also available in India.

Bard, will be powered by Gemini Pro, but will support only English. Support for other languages will be expanded subsequently. Other products such as Search, Ads and Chrome will continue to use PaLM for the time being, and be switched to Gemini eventually.

Google also said a new version of its Bard chatbot—Bard ‘Advan-ced’—will also be launched “early next year", and use the Gemini Ultra model. In a blog post, Demis Hassabis, CEO Deepmind, Google’s AI research division, said the company is already experimenting with Gemini underneath the Google Search Generative Experience (SGE), for which the company introduced Indic language support in August. Hassabis said Gemini has reduced latency of search results by “40%" as compared with PaLM-powered SGE outputs.