Illustration: The Verge
Google initially rolled out Gemini Live, its conversational AI voice chat, in just one language: English. Today, the company is expanding the service to a handful of other languages, starting with French, German, Portuguese, Hindi, and Spanish. And while support for these languages does appear to be imminent for a lot of people, the company is still couching promises of other Gemini features with fuzzy “coming weeks” timelines….Continue reading…
Source: The Verge
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Gemini, formerly known as Bard, is a generative artificial intelligence chatbot developed by Google. Based on the large language model (LLM) of the same name, it was launched in 2023 after being developed as a direct response to the rise of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. It was previously based on PaLM, and initially the LaMDA family of large language models.
LaMDA had been developed and announced in 2021, but it was not released to the public out of an abundance of caution. OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 and its subsequent popularity caught Google executives off-guard, prompting a sweeping response in the ensuing months. After mobilizing its workforce, the company launched Bard in a limited capacity in March 2023 before expanding to other countries in May.
Bard took center stage during the 2023 Google I/O keynote in May and was upgraded to the Gemini LLM in December. In February 2024, Bard and Duet AI, another artificial intelligence product from Google, were unified under the Gemini brand, coinciding with the launch of an Android app.
Gemini has received lukewarm responses. It became the center of controversy in February 2024, when social media users reported that it was generating historically inaccurate images of historical figures as people of color, with conservative commentators decrying its alleged bias as “wokeness”. OpenAI launched ChatGPT, a chatbot based on the GPT-3 family of large language models, in November 2022 and it gained worldwide attention, becoming a viral Internet sensation.
Alarmed by ChatGPT’s potential threat to Google Search, Google executives issued a “code red” alert, reassigning several teams to assist in the company’s artificial intelligence (AI) efforts. Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google and parent company Alphabet, was widely reported to have issued the alert, but Pichai later denied this to The New York Times.
In a rare move, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who had stepped down from their roles as co-CEOs of Alphabet in 2019, were summoned to emergency meetings with company executives to discuss Google’s response to ChatGPT. Brin requested access to Google’s code in February 2023, for the first time in years.
The company had unveiled LaMDA, a prototype LLM, in 2021 but not released it to the public. When asked by employees at an all-hands meeting whether LaMDA was a missed opportunity for Google to compete with ChatGPT, Pichai and Google AI chief Jeff Dean said that while the company had similar capabilities to ChatGPT, moving too quickly in that arena would represent a major “reputational risk” due to Google being substantially larger than OpenAI.
In January 2023, Google Brain sister company DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis hinted at plans for a ChatGPT rival, and Google employees were instructed to accelerate progress on a ChatGPT competitor, intensively testing “Apprentice Bard” and other chatbots. Pichai assured investors during Google’s quarterly earnings investor call in February that the company had plans to expand LaMDA’s availability and applications.
Gemini, then known as Bard, received mixed reviews upon its initial release. James Vincent of The Verge found it faster than ChatGPT and Bing Chat, but noted that the lack of Bing-esque footnotes was “both a blessing and a curse”, encouraging Google to be bolder when experimenting with AI. His colleague David Pierce was unimpressed by its uninteresting and sometimes inaccurate responses, adding that despite Google’s insistence that Bard was not a search engine, its user interface resembled that of one, which could cause problems for Google.
Cade Metz of The New York Times described Bard as “more cautious” than ChatGPT, while Shirin Ghaffary of Vox called it “dry and uncontroversial” due to the reserved nature of its responses. The Washington Post columnist Geoffrey A. Fowler found Bard a mixed bag, noting that it acted cautiously but could show Internet-influenced bias. Writing for ZDNET, Sabrina Ortiz believed ChatGPT and Bing Chat were “more capable overall” in comparison to Bard, while Wired journalist Lauren Goode found her conversation with Bard “the most bizarre” of the three.
After the introduction of extensions, The New York Times‘ Kevin Roose found the update underwhelming and “a bit of a mess” while Business Insider‘s Lakshmi Varanasi found that Bard often leaned more into flattery than facts. In a 60 Minutes conversation with Hsiao, Google senior vice president James Manyika, and Pichai, CBS News correspondent Scott Pelley found Gemini “unsettling”.
Associate professor Ethan Mollick of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania was underwhelmed by its artistic ineptitude. The New York Times conducted a test with ChatGPT and Gemini regarding their ability to handle tasks expected of human assistants, and concluded that ChatGPT’s performance was vastly superior to that of Gemini.
NewsGuard, a tool that rates the credibility of news articles, found that Gemini was more skilled at debunking known conspiracy theories than ChatGPT. A report published by the Associated Press cautioned that Gemini and other chatbots were prone to generate “false and misleading information that threatened to disenfranchise voters”.
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