Google is launching AI technology with which it wants to gain an edge over the competition

Enhancing Google’s Services

Gemini is the underlying technology that should improve Google’s own chatbot Bard, but also other well-known services such as the search engine and web browser Chrome. The technology can handle text, images, audio, video, and programming languages. Gemini cannot generate images at first, unlike the paid version of ChatGPT. It uses image generator DALL-E for this.

The stakes for the company are very high. CEO Sundar Pichai calls the transition to artificial intelligence (AI) the “most profound in our lifetimes, far bigger than the shift to mobile or the internet before it.” It is clear that Google wants to be at the forefront of that development, fearing that it will no longer be relevant in this area.

Blunder with chatbot Bard

The company was also surprised by the arrival of ChatGPT. Interestingly, the core of the technology was devised by researchers from Google and described by them in 2017. At the beginning of this year, an answer to ChatGPT had to be urgently found and that was Bard, with which the company started also made a big blunder.

In addition, ChatGPT is also popular as a search engine. Instead of getting ten links with advertisements, you get a human-looking answer. A completely different way of searching raises the question of how appropriate Google’s traditional search ads are. Every step Google takes in this area could jeopardize its own revenue model.

Better than OpenAI?

Google is launching multiple versions of Gemini. The so-called ‘pro’ variant will be available to consumers next week in chatbot Bard, to start with only in English. This version should be better than the free version of ChatGPT (GPT 3.5), which has been available since November last year. The most important variant is called ‘ultra’. According to Google’s own tests, that version performs better than OpenAI’s GPT4 technology on almost all tests.

But Google still does not dare to put that version on the market right away, wanting to test this with a selected group of customers and developers first. Next year, companies that use Google’s cloud services can also start working with them.