Google has introduced its latest AI system — Gemini, which the company heralds as the "most capable, flexible, and general AI model". It will be available to users across the world from Wednesday, December 6. Gemini will be integrated into Bard as well as the latest Pixel 8 Pro smartphones.
Gemini has been built from the ground up and is "multimodal" in nature, meaning it can understand and work with different types of information, including text, code, audio, image and video, at the same time. Google CEO Sundar Pichai Pichai said Gemini 1.0 is optimised for different sizes: Ultra, Pro, and Nano. Ultra for highly complex tasks, Pro for scaling across a wide range of tasks and Nano for on-device tasks.
In the blog post, Pichai said, "These are the first models of the Gemini era and the first realisation of the vision we had when we formed Google DeepMind earlier this year. This new era of models represents one of the biggest science and engineering efforts we’ve undertaken as a company."
Gemini Pro will be accessible to developers through the Gemini API in Google AI Studio and Google Cloud Vertex AI starting December 13. On the other hand, Gemini Nano will be accessible to Android developers through AICore, a new system capability introduced in Android 14. This capability will be made available on Pixel 8 Pro devices starting December 6, with plans to extend support to other Android devices in the future.
Gemini Ultra is currently being made available to select customers, developers, partners and safety and responsibility experts for early experimentation and feedback with a broader rollout to developers and enterprise customers early next year.
Google will also be using Gemini across all its products. Bard will use a fine-tuned version of Gemini Pro for more advanced reasoning, planning, and understanding. Meanwhile, Gemini Nano will be powering new features on Pixel 8 Pro smartphones like 'Summarise' in the Recorder app and will soon be available in Smart Reply in Gboard, starting with WhatsApp - with more messaging apps coming next year.
Gemini is also being used to make Google's generative AI search offering Search Generative Experience(SGE) faster for users. The company said that they witnessed a 40 percent reduction in latency in English in the United States, alongside improvements in quality.
Google also claims Gemini Ultra’s performance “exceeds current state-of-the-art results on 30 of the 32 widely-used academic benchmarks” used in large language model (LLM) research and development. With a score of 90.0%, Gemini Ultra is the first model to outperform human experts on massive multitask language understanding (MMLU), which uses a combination of 57 subjects such as maths, physics, history, law, medicine, and ethics for testing both world knowledge and problem-solving abilities, it added. Plus, the company claimed, Gemini can “understand, explain and generate high-quality code in the world’s most popular programming languages, like Python, Java, C++ and Go”.