Google on Wednesday infused its Bard chatbot with a new-generation artificial intelligence (AI) model called Gemini, which it touts as being able to “reason” better than ChatGPT and other rivals.
“This is incredible momentum, and yet, we’re only beginning to scratch the surface of what’s possible,” Google chief executive officer Sundar Pichai said in a release. “This new era of models represents one of the biggest science and engineering efforts we’ve undertaken as a company.”
It is the first AI model to outperform human experts in certain benchmarks involving problem solving, math, physics, history, law, medicine and ethics, Google DeepMind vice president of product Eli Collins said during a briefing.
Photo: AFP
A demonstration showed Gemini recognizing what it was shown, from a person acting out a Matrix movie scene to someone drawing a duck and then holding up a rubber duck.
Gemini commented on what it was shown, making comparisons, drawing conclusions and offering suggestions.
Performance of an “Ultra” version of Gemini “far exceeds” that of other state-of-the-art models in 30 benchmark tests measuring capabilities such as image understanding or mathematical reasoning, Collins said.
A “Pro” version of Gemini built into Bard is designed to handle a wide range of tasks. A “Nano” version is tailored for smartphones, coming first to Google’s top-of-the-line Pixel 8 handset.
Bard will use Gemini for more advanced reasoning, planning and understanding capabilities, a demonstration showed.
It will be available in English in more than 170 countries and territories, with more languages added soon, Bard vice president Sissie Hsiao (蕭茜) said.
Gemini-infused Bard would be expanded to be “multimodal,” meaning it will be able to work with auditory and visual input as well as text prompts, Google said.
The Ultra version of Gemini designed to handle highly complex tasks would be released early next year, it said.
Google in September integrated Gmail, YouTube and other tools into its Bard chatbot as tech giants seek to persuade users that generative AI is useful and not dangerous or just a fad.
Those capabilities closely match offerings from Microsoft Corp that infuse its Office 365 apps with AI powers, although those come at an extra cost to customers and are not available through the chatbot on its search engine Bing.
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