Google has officially announced its new Gemini artificial intelligence (AI) model, an artificial intelligence system that will power many of the company’s products, from the Google Bard chatbot to Pixel phones. The company describes Gemini as the most capable model it has ever created and claims it will make artificial intelligence more useful for everyone.
Google announced that Gemini will come in three different ‘sizes’: Ultra, Pro and Nano. Each of these is also said to be designed for different uses, and they will all be multi-modal, meaning they will be able to handle a wide variety of inputs. However, Google states that Gemini can accept text, code, audio, image and video as prompts.
With all this new power, Google claims to be conducting rigorous testing to detect and prevent any negative consequences that may arise from people using Gemini. This is a challenge, according to the company, because Gemini’s multi-modal nature means that two seemingly harmless inputs (like text and images) can be combined to create something dangerous.
Google is working hard to catch up with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and its advanced AI capabilities. In fact, just a few days ago, there were reports circulating that Google had postponed the Gemini announcement until next year due to its lackluster performance in various languages. However, we now understand that this news is false or Gemini continues on its path despite its rumored flaws. On the other hand, it is also an important point that Gemini will initially work only in English.
If you’re using a Pixel 8 Pro phone, Google says it can now run the Gemini Nano and bring all its AI capabilities to your pocket. According to a Google blog post, Gemini is available in two new Pixel 8 Pro features. The first is “Smart Reply”, which suggests message replies on Gboard. The other one is “Summarize”, which can summarize conversations and presentations recorded in Recorder.
The Google Bard chatbot has also been updated to run Gemini, which the company says is the “biggest upgrade to Bard since its launch.” In addition, Google says that Gemini will be available in more products and services such as Search, Ads, Chrome and Duet AI in the coming months.
As part of the announcement, Google also showed off some samples of Gemini. In the images shown, we see that artificial intelligence predicts what a user is drawing and plays music suitable for the drawing.