Google Gemini: Everything you need to know about the new generative AI platform

Google’s attempting to make waves with Gemini, its flagship suite of generative AI fashions, apps and companies.

So what’s Gemini? How will you use it? And the way does it stack up to the competition?

To make it simpler to maintain up with the newest Gemini developments, we’ve put collectively this helpful information, which we’ll hold up to date as new Gemini fashions, options and information about Google’s plans for Gemini are launched.

What’s Gemini?

Gemini is Google’s long-promised, next-gen GenAI mannequin household, developed by Google’s AI analysis labs DeepMind and Google Analysis. It is available in three flavors:

• Gemini Extremely, essentially the most performant Gemini mannequin.
• Gemini Professional, a “lite” Gemini mannequin.
• Gemini Nano, a smaller “distilled” mannequin that runs on cell units just like the Pixel 8 Pro.

All Gemini fashions have been skilled to be “natively multimodal” — in different phrases, capable of work with and use extra than simply phrases. They have been pretrained and fine-tuned on a wide range of audio, photographs and movies, a big set of codebases and textual content in several languages.

This units Gemini aside from fashions corresponding to Google’s personal LaMDA, which was skilled solely on textual content information. LaMDA can’t perceive or generate something aside from textual content (e.g., essays, e-mail drafts), however that isn’t the case with Gemini fashions.

What’s the distinction between the Gemini apps and Gemini fashions?

Picture Credit: Google

Google, proving once again that it lacks a knack for branding, didn’t make it clear from the outset that Gemini is separate and distinct from the Gemini apps on the net and cell (previously Bard). The Gemini apps are merely an interface by way of which sure Gemini fashions might be accessed — consider it as a shopper for Google’s GenAI.

By the way, the Gemini apps and fashions are additionally completely impartial from Imagen 2, Google’s text-to-image mannequin that’s out there in among the firm’s dev instruments and environments.

What can Gemini do?

As a result of the Gemini fashions are multimodal, they will in principle carry out a spread of multimodal duties, from transcribing speech to captioning photographs and movies to producing art work. A few of these capabilities have reached the product stage but (extra on that later), and Google’s promising all of them — and extra — in some unspecified time in the future within the not-too-distant future.

After all, it’s a bit laborious to take the corporate at its phrase.

Google seriously underdelivered with the unique Bard launch. And extra just lately it ruffled feathers with a video purporting to show Gemini’s capabilities that turned out to have been closely doctored and was roughly aspirational.

Nonetheless, assuming Google is being roughly truthful with its claims, right here’s what the completely different tiers of Gemini will be capable of do as soon as they attain their full potential:

Gemini Extremely

Google says that Gemini Ultra — due to its multimodality — can be utilized to assist with issues like physics homework, fixing issues step-by-step on a worksheet and declaring attainable errors in already filled-in solutions.

Gemini Extremely can be utilized to duties corresponding to figuring out scientific papers related to a specific downside, Google says — extracting info from these papers and “updating” a chart from one by producing the formulation essential to re-create the chart with more moderen information.

Gemini Extremely technically helps picture era, as alluded to earlier. However that functionality hasn’t made its approach into the productized model of the mannequin but — maybe as a result of the mechanism is extra complicated than how apps corresponding to ChatGPT generate photographs. Somewhat than feed prompts to a picture generator (like DALL-E 3, in ChatGPT’s case), Gemini outputs photographs “natively,” with out an middleman step.

Gemini Extremely is obtainable as an API by way of Vertex AI, Google’s absolutely managed AI developer platform, and AI Studio, Google’s web-based device for app and platform builders. It additionally powers the Gemini apps — however not free of charge. Entry to Gemini Extremely by way of what Google calls Gemini Superior requires subscribing to the Google One AI Premium Plan, priced at $20 monthly.

The AI Premium Plan additionally connects Gemini to your wider Google Workspace account — suppose emails in Gmail, paperwork in Docs, displays in Sheets and Google Meet recordings. That’s helpful for, say, summarizing emails or having Gemini seize notes throughout a video name.

Gemini Professional

Google says that Gemini Professional is an enchancment over LaMDA in its reasoning, planning and understanding capabilities.

An impartial study by Carnegie Mellon and BerriAI researchers discovered that the preliminary model of Gemini Professional was certainly higher than OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 at dealing with longer and extra complicated reasoning chains. However the research additionally discovered that, like all giant language fashions, this model of Gemini Professional notably struggled with arithmetic issues involving a number of digits, and users found examples of bad reasoning and apparent errors.

Google promised treatments, although — and the primary arrived within the type of Gemini 1.5 Pro.

Designed to be a drop-in substitute, Gemini 1.5 Professional is improved in quite a lot of areas in contrast with its predecessor, maybe most importantly within the quantity of information that it may well course of. Gemini 1.5 Professional can absorb ~700,000 phrases, or ~30,000 traces of code — 35x the quantity Gemini 1.0 Professional can deal with. And — the mannequin being multimodal — it’s not restricted to textual content. Gemini 1.5 Professional can analyze as much as 11 hours of audio or an hour of video in a wide range of completely different languages, albeit slowly (e.g., looking for a scene in a one-hour video takes 30 seconds to a minute of processing).

Gemini 1.5 Professional entered public preview on Vertex AI in April.

A further endpoint, Gemini Professional Imaginative and prescient, can course of textual content and imagery — together with pictures and video — and output textual content alongside the traces of OpenAI’s GPT-4 with Vision mannequin.

Utilizing Gemini Professional in Vertex AI. Picture Credit: Gemini

Inside Vertex AI, builders can customise Gemini Professional to particular contexts and use circumstances utilizing a fine-tuning or “grounding” course of. Gemini Professional can be linked to exterior, third-party APIs to carry out specific actions.

In AI Studio, there’s workflows for creating structured chat prompts utilizing Gemini Professional. Builders have entry to each Gemini Professional and the Gemini Professional Imaginative and prescient endpoints, and so they can alter the mannequin temperature to regulate the output’s inventive vary and supply examples to provide tone and magnificence directions — and in addition tune the protection settings.

As soon as Gemini 1.5 Professional exits preview in Vertex, nevertheless, the mannequin will value $0.0025 per character whereas output will value $0.00005 per character. Vertex prospects pay per 1,000 characters (about 140 to 250 phrases) and, within the case of fashions like Gemini Professional Imaginative and prescient, per picture ($0.0025).

Let’s assume a 500-word article comprises 2,000 characters. Summarizing that article with Gemini 1.5 Professional would value $5. In the meantime, producing an article of an analogous size would value $0.1.

Extremely pricing has but to be introduced.