What you wanted to know about Google Gemini AI, but were afraid of asking - 10 points

Google Gemini AI has been launched on Wednesday and it has been injected into its Bard chatbot.

Google is targetting taking generative AI lead from ChatGPT-maker OpenAI with Gemini AI. (AFP)

Google Gemini AI has been launched on Wednesday and it has been injected into its Bard chatbot. This is a new-generation artificial intelligence model and, although Google executives refused to compare it with the OpenAI chatbot, it is being hyped up 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 Sundar Pichai said in a release. While OpenAI teamed up with Microsoft to add financial heft, Google has gone with DeepMind to create Gemini, the main competitor to ChatGPT.

"This new era of models represents one of the biggest science and engineering efforts we've undertaken as a company," Pichai said in the release.

With leader in the AI field, OpenAI now suffering from intense insider strife, the time is ripe for Google to not only catch up with its rival, which launched ChatGPT about a year ago, but actually beat it. Notably, Google is targetting taking generative AI lead from ChatGPT-maker OpenAI in the aftermath of the sacking of CEO Sam Altman and his return a few days later. So, what is Google Gemini AI all about?

10 Things to Know

1. Google says it is an 'AI first' company, but was clearly caught off guard by OpenAI's launch of ChatGPT. And what hurt the most was that OpenAI did it in partnership with bitter rival Microsoft. The most galling part was definitely the fact that its popularity skyrocketted as it was made available to users worldwide. Now, with the kind of features Gemini is promising to deliver, it may well be OpenAI that will have to prove it is better.

2. It is the first AI model to outperform human experts in certain benchmarks involving problem solving, math, physics, history, law, medicine and ethics,.

3. In a very successful demonstration, Gemini was able to recognize 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.

4. Gemini even made comparisons, drew conclusions, and offered suggestions.

5. That is not all. In fact, the performance of Gemini “Ultra” version far exceeds" that of other state-of-the-art models in 30 benchmark tests measuring capabilities such as image understanding or mathematical reasoning. The "Ultra" version will be released early next year.

6. 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.

7. Now, Bard will use Gemini for more advanced reasoning, planning, and understanding capabilities.

8. It will be available in English in more than 170 countries and territories, with more languages added soon.

9. Bard, with Gemini AI, will be expanded to be "multi-modal." That means, it will be able to work with auditory and visual input as well as text prompts. Google says Gemini brings it one step closer to its vision of creating the “best AI collaborator in the world”.

10. Gemini ramps up the quality of Bard's performance, whether in writing poetry or computer code to shopping queries or research projects.