Google’s Gemini showcases more powerful technology, but we’re still not close to superhuman AI

By Christian Gagné, Université Laval

In December 2023, Google announced the launch of its new large language model (LLM) named Gemini. Gemini now provides the artificial intelligence (AI) foundations of Google products; it is also a direct rival to OpenAI’s GPT-4.

But why is Google considering Gemini as such an important milestone, and what does this mean for users of Google’s services? And generally speaking, what does it mean in the context of the current hyperfast-paced developments of AI?

AI everywhere

Google is betting on Gemini to transform most of its products by enhancing current functionalities and creating new ones for services such as search, Gmail, YouTube and its office productivity suite. This would also allow improvements to their online advertising business — their main source of revenue — as well as for Android phone software, with trimmed versions of Gemini running on limited capacity hardware.

https://youtu.be/UIZAiXYceBI?si=gnpQjHw4f4heFC8I

For users, Gemini means new features and improved capacities that would make Google services harder to shun, strengthening an already dominant position in areas such as search engines. The potential and opportunities for Google are considerable, given the bulk of their software is easily upgradable cloud services.

But the huge and unexpected success of ChatGPT attracted a lot of attention and enhanced the credibility of OpenAI. Gemini will allow Google to reinstate itself as a major player in AI in the public view. Google is a powerhouse in AI, with large and strong research teams at the origin of many major advances of the last decade.

There is public discussion about these new technologies, both on the benefits they provide and the disruption they create in fields such as education, design and health care.

Strengthening AI

At its core, Gemini relies on transformer networks. Originally devised by a research team at Google, the same technology is used to power other LLMs such as GPT-4.

A distinctive element of Gemini is its capacity to deal with different data modalities: text, audio, image and video.

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