Gemini is available to consumers in Bard or Pixel 8 Pro now, with an enterprise model coming Dec. 13.

Google has revealed Gemini, its long-rumored large language model and rival to GPT-4. Global users of Google Bard and the Pixel 8 Pro will be able to run Gemini starting now; an enterprise product, Gemini Pro, is coming on Dec. 13. Developers can sign up now for an early preview in Android AICore.

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What is Gemini?

Gemini is a large language model that runs generative artificial intelligence applications; it can summarize text, create images and answer questions. Gemini was trained on Google’s Tensor Processing Units v4 and v5e.

Google’s Bard is a generative AI based on the PaLM large language mode. Starting today, Gemini will be used to give Bard “more advanced reasoning, planning, understanding and more,” according to a Google press release.

SEE: Microsoft invested $3.2 billion on AI in the UK. (TechRepublic) 

Gemini size options

Gemini comes in three model sizes: Ultra, Pro and Nano. Ultra is the most capable, Nano is the smallest and most efficient, and Pro sits in the middle for general tasks. The Nano version is what Google is using on the Pixel, while Bard gets Pro. Google says it plans to run “extensive trust and safety checks” before releasing Gemini Ultra to select groups.

Gemini for coding

Gemini can code in Python, Java, C++, Go and other popular programming languages. Google used Gemini to upgrade Google’s AI-powered code generation system, AlphaCode.

Gemini will be added to more Google products

Next, Google plans to bring Gemini to Ads, Chrome and Duet AI. In the future, Gemini will be used in Google Search as well.

Competitors to Gemini

Gemini and the products built with it, such as chatbots, will compete with OpenAI’s GPT-4, Microsoft’s Copilot (which is based on OpenAI’s GPT-4), Anthropic’s Claude AI, Meta’s Llama 2 and more. Google claims Gemini Ultra outperforms GPT-4 in several benchmarks, including the massive multitask language understanding general knowledge test and in Python code generation.

Does Gemini have an enterprise product?

Starting Dec. 13, enterprise customers and developers will be able to access Gemini Pro through the Gemini API in Google’s Vertex AI or Google AI Studio.

Google expects Gemini Nano to be generally available for developers and enterprise customers in early 2024. Android developers can use this LLM to build Gemini apps on-device through AndroidAICore.

Possible enterprise use cases for Gemini

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Of particular interest to enterprise use cases might be Gemini’s ability to “understand and reason about users’ intent,” said Palash Nandy, engineering director at Google, in a demonstration video. Gemini generates a bespoke UI depending on whether the user is looking for images or text. In the same UI, Gemini will flag areas in which it doesn’t have enough information and ask for clarification. Through the bespoke UI, the user can explore other options with increasing detail.

Gemini has been trained on multimodal content from the very beginning instead of starting with text and expanding to audio, images and video later, letting Gemini parse written or visual information with equal acuity. One example of how this might be useful for business Google provides is the prompt “Could Gemini help make a demo based on this video?” in which the AI translates video content to an original animation.

Gemini’s timing compared to other popular LLMs

Gemini has been hotly rumored, as Google tries to compete with OpenAI. The New York Times reported Google executives were “shaken” by OpenAI’s tech in January 2023. More recently, Google supposedly struggled with releasing Gemini in languages other than English, leading to a delay of an in-person launch event.

However, releasing Google’s own large language model after ChatGPT has received gradual GPT-4 powered updates for nearly a year means Google has the advantage of leapfrogging the last year of AI development. For example, Gemini is multimodal (i.e., able to work with text, video, speech and code) and lives natively on the Google Pixel 8. Users can access Gemini on their Google Pixel 8 without an internet connection, unlike ChatGPT, which started out in a browser.