Googles Gemini AI model now powers the Bard chatbot

Google Gemini — formerly called Bard — is an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot tool designed by Google to simulate human conversations using natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning. In addition to supplementing Google Search, Gemini can be integrated into websites, messaging platforms or applications to provide realistic, natural language responses to user questions. Like many recent language models, including BERT and GPT-3, it’s built on Transformer, a neural network architecture that Google Research invented and open-sourced in 2017.

The move highlights Google’s attempts to find a business model for its investments in AI, which have opened new strategic opportunities in the market but also require tremendous computing power and other resources. “Google was hesitant to productize this,” said John Hennessy, a Stanford University professor and board member of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, in an April talk. It’s a revolution in what computers can offer, combining a wealth of information with a natural interface. Chatbots have shown skills in writing poetry, answering philosophy questions, constructing software, passing exams and offering tax advice. The actual performance of the chatbot also led to much negative feedback. “This highlights the importance of a rigorous testing process, something that we’re kicking off this week with our Trusted Tester program,” a Google spokesperson told ZDNET.

Upon Gemini’s release, Google touted its ability to generate images the same way as other generative AI tools, such as Dall-E, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion. Gemini currently uses Google’s Imagen 2 text-to-image model, which gives the tool image generation capabilities. Specifically, the Gemini LLMs use a transformer model-based neural network architecture. The Gemini architecture has been enhanced to process lengthy contextual sequences across different data types, including text, audio and video.

How to Get Gemini Advanced, Google’s Subscription-Only AI Chatbot

Soon, users will also be able to access Gemini on mobile via the newly unveiled Gemini Android app or the Google app for iOS. Previously, Gemini had a waitlist that opened on March 21, 2023, and the tech giant granted access to limited numbers of users in the US and UK on a rolling basis. By David Pierce, editor-at-large and Vergecast co-host with over a decade of experience covering consumer tech.

On May 10, 2023, Google removed the waitlist and made Bard available in more than 180 countries and territories. Almost precisely a year after its initial announcement, Bard was renamed Gemini. Gemini integrates NLP capabilities, which provide the ability to understand and process language.

A chat with a friend about a TV show could evolve into a discussion about the country where the show was filmed before settling on a debate about that country’s best regional cuisine. This version is optimized for a range of tasks in which it performs similarly to Gemini 1.0 Ultra, but with an added experimental feature focused on long-context understanding. According to Google, early tests show Gemini 1.5 Pro outperforming 1.0 Pro on about 87% of Google’s benchmarks established for developing LLMs. Ongoing testing is expected until a full rollout of 1.5 Pro is announced. Users must be at least 18 years old and have a personal Google account. In other countries where the platform is available, the minimum age is 13 unless otherwise specified by local laws.

Users who pay for the Google One AI Premium subscription will be able to use Gemini in popular products such as Gmail and Google Docs, rather than toggling back and forth with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The Ultra model, which becomes available to the broader public on Thursday, performs better with more complex tasks such as coding and logical reasoning, the company said. “Starting next week, we’re going to make code citations even more precise by showing you the specific blocks of code that are being sourced along with any relevant licensing information,” Krawczyk said.

Users sign up for Gemini Advanced through a Google One AI Premium subscription, which also includes Google Workspace features and 2 terabytes of storage. Google probably has a long way to go before Gemini has name recognition on par with ChatGPT. OpenAI has said that ChatGPT has over 100 million weekly active users, and has been considered one of the fastest-growing consumer products in history since its initial launch in November 2022. OpenAI’s four-day boardroom drama a year later, in which cofounder and CEO Sam Altman was fired and then reinstated, hardly seems to have slowed it down.

It would be more meaningful for Google to show clear improvements on reducing the hallucinations that language models experience when serving web search results, he says. When OpenAI’s ChatGPT opened a new era in tech, the industry’s former AI champ, Google, responded by reorganizing its labs and launching a profusion of sometimes overlapping AI services. This included the Bard chatbot, workplace helper Duet AI, and a chatbot-style version of search. Like most AI chatbots, Gemini can code, answer math problems, and help with your writing needs. To access it, all you have to do is visit the Gemini website and sign into your Google account.

Google’s decision to use its own LLMs — LaMDA, PaLM 2, and Gemini — was a bold one because some of the most popular AI chatbots right now, including ChatGPT and Copilot, use a language model in the GPT series. Our goal is to deliver the most accurate information and the most knowledgeable advice possible in order to help you make smarter buying decisions on tech gear and a wide array of products and services. Our editors thoroughly review and fact-check every article to ensure that our content meets the highest standards. If we have made an error or published misleading information, we will correct or clarify the article. If you see inaccuracies in our content, please report the mistake via this form.

Is Gemini free to use?

Despite pioneering some of the technology behind new chatbots, Google was somewhat late to the party. Microsoft, an OpenAI investor, built the underlying GPT-4 technology into its own Bing search engine. But the most important question we ask ourselves when it comes to our technologies is whether they adhere to our AI Principles. Language might be one of humanity’s greatest tools, but like all tools it can be misused. Models trained on language can propagate that misuse — for instance, by internalizing biases, mirroring hateful speech, or replicating misleading information. And even when the language it’s trained on is carefully vetted, the model itself can still be put to ill use.

It’s able to understand and recognize images, enabling it to parse complex visuals, such as charts and figures, without the need for external optical character recognition (OCR). It also has broad multilingual capabilities for translation tasks and functionality across different languages. That may be inspired by the downright ebullient chatbots launched by some smaller AI upstarts, such as Pi from startup Inflection AI and the various app-specific personae that ChatGPT’s custom GPTs now have. When Google first unveiled the Gemini AI model it was portrayed as a new foundation for its AI offerings, but the company had held back the most powerful version, saying it needed more testing for safety. That version, Gemini Ultra, is now being made available inside a premium version of Google’s chatbot, called Gemini Advanced. Accessing it requires a subscription to a new tier of the Google One cloud backup service called AI Premium.

The best part is that Google is offering users a two-month free trial as part of the new plan. For example, when I asked Gemini, “What are some of the best places to visit in New York?”, it provided a list of places and included photos for each.

“This applies to citing narrative content from across the web as well.” Google hopes to help with this problem with an improvement coming soon, initially with responses involving programming code. The future of Gemini is also about a broader rollout and integrations across the Google portfolio.

More recently, we’ve invented machine learning techniques that help us better grasp the intent of Search queries. Over time, our advances in these and other areas have made it easier and easier to organize and access the heaps of information conveyed by the written and spoken word. This generative AI tool specializes in original text generation as well as rewriting content and avoiding plagiarism. It handles other simple tasks to aid professionals in writing assignments, such as proofreading. Multiple startup companies have similar chatbot technologies, but without the spotlight ChatGPT has received.

Also, users younger than 18 can only use the Gemini web app in English. Gemini Pro is available in more than 230 countries and territories, while Gemini Advanced is available in more than 150 countries at the time of this writing. However, there are age limits in place to comply with laws and regulations that exist to govern AI.

Lemoine, a software engineer at Google, had been working on the development of LaMDA for months. His experience with the program, described in a recent Washington Post article, caused quite a stir. In the article, Lemoine recounts many dialogues he had with LaMDA in which the two talked about various topics, ranging from technical to philosophical issues.

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 and sent them into a panic, prompting a sweeping response in the ensuing months. After mobilizing its workforce, the company launched Bard in February 2023, which took center stage during the 2023 Google I/O keynote in May and was upgraded to the Gemini LLM in December. Bard and Duet AI were unified under the Gemini brand in February 2024, coinciding with the launch of an Android app. While OpenAI’s ChatGPT has become a worldwide phenomenon and one of the fastest-growing consumer products ever, Google’s Bard has been something of an afterthought.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai called Bard “a souped-up Civic” compared to ChatGPT and Bing Chat, now Copilot. According to Gemini’s FAQ, as of February, the chatbot is available in over 40 languages, a major advantage over its biggest rival, ChatGPT, which is available only in English. Android users will have the option to download the Gemini app from the Google Play Store or opt-in through Google Assistant. Bard was first announced on February 6 in a statement from Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai.

Gemini will eventually be incorporated into the Google Chrome browser to improve the web experience for users. Google has also pledged to integrate Gemini into the Google Ads platform, providing new ways for advertisers to connect with and engage users. The Duet AI assistant is also set to benefit from Gemini in the future.

As was the case with Palm 2, Gemini was integrated into multiple Google technologies to provide generative AI capabilities. When the new Gemini launches, it will be available in English in the US to start, followed by availability in the broader Asia Pacific region in English, Japanese, and Korean. At Google I/O 2023, the company announced Gemini, a large language model created by Google DeepMind. At the time of Google I/O, the company reported that the LLM was still in its early phases.

Google has opened the Bard floodgates, at least to English speakers in many parts of the world. After two months of more limited testing, the waitlist governing access to the AI-powered chatbot is gone. Google Gemini is a direct competitor to the GPT-3 and GPT-4 models from OpenAI. The following Chat PG table compares some key features of Google Gemini and OpenAI products. After rebranding Bard to Gemini on Feb. 8, 2024, Google introduced a paid tier in addition to the free web application. However, users can only get access to Ultra through the Gemini Advanced option for $20 per month.

Marketed as a “ChatGPT alternative with superpowers,” Chatsonic is an AI chatbot powered by Google Search with an AI-based text generator, Writesonic, that lets users discuss topics in real time to create text or images. That opened the door for other search engines to license ChatGPT, whereas Gemini supports only Google. Both Gemini and ChatGPT are AI chatbots designed for interaction with people through NLP and machine learning. Both use an underlying LLM for generating and creating conversational text. However, in late February 2024, Gemini’s image generation feature was halted to undergo retooling after generated images were shown to depict factual inaccuracies.

Gemini has undergone several large language model (LLM) upgrades since it launched. Initially, Gemini, known as Bard at the time, used a lightweight model version of LaMDA that required less computing power and could be scaled to more users. Gemini will be available through a special app in the Android mobile operating system, while for iPhone users it will be tucked into the Google app. Hsiao said Google is working to launch the product in more languages and countries.

We gather data from the best available sources, including vendor and retailer listings as well as other relevant and independent reviews sites. And we pore over customer reviews to find out what matters to real people who already own and use the products and services we’re assessing. Some observers likened Gemini’s ahistorical diversity to “Hamilton” or “Bridgerton”. On February 22nd Google said it would halt the generation of images of people while it rejigged Gemini. But by then attention had moved on to the chatbot’s text responses, which turned out to be just as surprising. These early results are encouraging, and we look forward to sharing more soon, but sensibleness and specificity aren’t the only qualities we’re looking for in models like LaMDA.

Now Google is consolidating many of its generative AI products under the banner of its latest AI model Gemini—and taking direct aim at OpenAI’s subscription service ChatGPT Plus. In its July wave of updates, Google added multimodal search, allowing users the ability to input pictures as well as text to the chatbot. When Google Bard first launched almost a year ago, it had some major flaws.

Google Bard was released a little over a month later, on March 21, 2023. When you click through from our site to a retailer and buy a product or service, we may earn affiliate commissions. This helps support our work, but does not affect what we cover or how, and it does not affect the price you pay. Neither ZDNET nor the author are compensated for these independent reviews. Indeed, we follow strict guidelines that ensure our editorial content is never influenced by advertisers. A version of this article originally appeared in Le Scienze and was reproduced with permission.

It also had a share-conversation function and a double-check function that helped users fact-check generated results. Another similarity between the two chatbots is their potential to generate plagiarized content and their ability to control this issue. Neither Gemini nor ChatGPT has built-in plagiarism detection features that users can rely on to verify that outputs are original. However, separate tools exist to detect plagiarism in AI-generated content, so users have other options. Gemini is able to cite other content in its responses and link to sources.

• A chat with a friend about a TV show could evolve into a discussion about the country where the show was filmed before settling on a debate about that country’s best regional cuisine.
• At launch on Dec. 6, 2023, Gemini was announced to be made up of a series of different model sizes, each designed for a specific set of use cases and deployment environments.
• That meandering quality can quickly stump modern conversational agents (commonly known as chatbots), which tend to follow narrow, pre-defined paths.
• Since then, it has grown significantly with two large language model (LLM) upgrades and several updates, and the new name might be a way to leave the past reputation in the past.

Lemoine said he considers LaMDA to be his “colleague” and a “person,” even if not a human. And he insists that it has a right be recognized—so much so that he has been the go-between in connecting the algorithm with a lawyer. Google announced the move at its Google I/O developer conference on Wednesday, a week after Microsoft removed the waitlist for its competing Bing chatbot. In addition to opening Bard up to people in 180 English-speaking countries and territories, it added Japanese and Korean chat abilities as part of a 40-language expansion plan. Bard also integrated with several Google apps and services, including YouTube, Maps, Hotels, Flights, Gmail, Docs and Drive, letting users apply the AI tool to their personal content. Prior to Google pausing access to the image creation feature, Gemini’s outputs ranged from simple to complex, depending on end-user inputs.

Since then, it has grown significantly with two large language model (LLM) upgrades and several updates, and the new name might be a way to leave the past reputation in the past. Regardless of what LaMDA actually achieved, the issue of the difficult “measurability” of emulation capabilities expressed by machines also emerges. In the journal Mind in 1950, mathematician Alan Turing proposed a test to determine whether a machine was capable of exhibiting intelligent behavior, a game of imitation of some of the human cognitive functions. It was reformulated and updated several times but continued to be something of an ultimate goal for many developers of intelligent machines. Theoretically, AIs capable of passing the test should be considered formally “intelligent” because they would be indistinguishable from a human being in test situations.

Learn about the top LLMs, including well-known ones and others that are more obscure. Jasper Chat is a conversational AI tool that’s focused on generating text. It’s aimed at companies looking to create brand-relevant content and have conversations with customers. It enables content creators to specify search engine optimization keywords and tone of voice in their prompts.

For example, someone with a flat tyre could take a picture of the mishap to ask for advice. “We’ll continue to expand to the top 40 languages very soon after I/O,” Krawczyk said. Google could have expanded to 40 languages now, but limited it to Japanese and Korean to proceed more carefully, he said. But now Google is working to catch up with what Bard product leader Jack Krawczyk calls a “bold and responsible approach” intended to balance progress with caution. The generative AI tool is available in English in many parts of the world. While conversations tend to revolve around specific topics, their open-ended nature means they can start in one place and end up somewhere completely different.

Any bias inherent in the training data fed to Gemini could lead to wariness among users. For example, as is the case with all advanced AI software, training data that excludes certain groups within a given population will lead to skewed outputs. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. Rebranding the platform as Gemini some believe might have been done to draw attention away from the Bard moniker and the criticism the chatbot faced when it was first released. It also simplified Google’s AI effort and focused on the success of the Gemini LLM. Gemini 1.0 was announced on Dec. 6, 2023, and built by Alphabet’s Google DeepMind business unit, which is focused on advanced AI research and development. Google co-founder Sergey Brin is credited with helping to develop the Gemini LLMs, alongside other Google staff.

Alphabet’s Google rebranded its chatbot and rolled out a new subscription plan that will give people access to its most powerful artificial intelligence (AI) model, placing it squarely in competition with rival OpenAI. “This is part of our commitment to responsibility and alignment and understanding the limitations that we know large language models have,” Krawczyk said. Alignment refers to the principle of making sure AI behavior is aligned with human interests.

David Yoffie, a professor at Harvard Business School who studies the strategy of big technology platforms, says it makes sense for Google to rebrand Bard, since many users will think of it as an also-ran to ChatGPT. Yoffie adds that charging for access to Gemini Advanced makes sense because of how expensive the technology is to build—as Google CEO Sundar Pichai acknowledged in an interview with WIRED. Then, in December 2023, Google upgraded Gemini again, this time to Gemini, the company’s most capable and advanced LLM to date. Specifically, Gemini uses a fine-tuned version of Gemini Pro for English. Google renamed Google Bard to Gemini on February 8 as a nod to Google’s LLM that powers the AI chatbot. “To reflect the advanced tech at its core, Bard will now simply be called Gemini,” said Sundar Pichai, Google CEO, in the announcement.

Gemini, under its original Bard name, was initially designed around search. It aimed to allow for more natural language queries, rather than keywords, for search. Its AI was trained around natural-sounding https://chat.openai.com/ conversational queries and responses. Instead of giving a list of answers, it provided context to the responses. Bard was designed to help with follow-up questions — something new to search.

This has been one of the biggest risks with ChatGPT responses since its inception, as it is with other advanced AI tools. In addition, since Gemini doesn’t always understand context, its responses might not always be relevant to the prompts and queries users provide. Google initially announced Bard, its AI-powered chatbot, on Feb. 6, 2023, with a vague release date. It opened access to Bard on March 21, 2023, inviting users to join a waitlist.

What are the concerns about Gemini?

A simple step-by-step process was required for a user to enter a prompt, view the image Gemini generated, edit it and save it for later use. The Google Gemini models are used in many different ways, including text, image, audio and video understanding. The multimodal nature of Gemini also enables these different types of input to be combined for generating output.

• “If I didn’t know exactly what it was, which is this computer program we built recently, I’d think it was a 7-year-old, 8-year-old kid that happens to know physics,” he told the Washington Post.
• If you see inaccuracies in our content, please report the mistake via this form.
• Indeed, it is no longer a rarity to interact in a very normal way on the Web with users who are not actually human—just open the chat box on almost any large consumer Web site.
• ZDNET’s recommendations are based on many hours of testing, research, and comparison shopping.

Typically, a $10 subscription to Google One comes with 2 terabytes of extra storage and other benefits; now that same package is available with Gemini Advanced thrown in for $20 per month. Even though the technologies in Google Labs are in preview, they are google’s chatbot highly functional. Google has developed other AI services that have yet to be released to the public. The tech giant typically treads lightly when it comes to AI products and doesn’t release them until the company is confident about a product’s performance.

That means Gemini can reason across a sequence of different input data types, including audio, images and text. For example, Gemini can understand handwritten notes, graphs and diagrams to solve complex problems. The Gemini architecture supports directly ingesting text, images, audio waveforms and video frames as interleaved sequences. Google Gemini is a family of multimodal AI large language models (LLMs) that have capabilities in language, audio, code and video understanding.

In April, Lemoine explained his perspective in an internal company document, intended only for Google executives. But after his claims were dismissed, Lemoine went public with his work on this artificial intelligence algorithm—and Google placed him on administrative leave. “If I didn’t know exactly what it was, which is this computer program we built recently, I’d think it was a 7-year-old, 8-year-old kid that happens to know physics,” he told the Washington Post.

Indeed, it is no longer a rarity to interact in a very normal way on the Web with users who are not actually human—just open the chat box on almost any large consumer Web site. “That said, I confess that reading the text exchanges between LaMDA and Lemoine made quite an impression on me! Perhaps most striking are the exchanges related to the themes of existence and death, a dialogue so deep and articulate that it prompted Lemoine to question whether LaMDA could actually be sentient. Pichai says he thinks of this launch both as a big moment for Bard and as the very beginning of the Gemini era. But if Google’s benchmarking is right, the new model might already make Bard as good a chatbot as ChatGPT. The non-text interactions are where Gemini in general really shines, says Demis Hassabis, the head of Google DeepMind.

Google then made its Gemini model available to the public in December. LaMDA was built on Transformer, Google’s neural network architecture that the company invented and open-sourced in 2017. Interestingly, GPT-3, the language model ChatGPT functions on, was also built on Transformer, according to Google. On the other hand, we are talking about an algorithm designed to do exactly that”—to sound like a person—says Enzo Pasquale Scilingo, a bioengineer at the Research Center E. Piaggio at the University of Pisa in Italy.

The results are impressive, tackling complex tasks such as hands or faces pretty decently, as you can see in the photo below. It automatically generates two photos, but if you’d like to see four, you can click the “generate more” option. Yes, in late May 2023, Gemini was updated to include images in its answers. The images are pulled from Google and shown when you ask a question that can be better answered by including a photo.

It will have its own app on Android phones, and on Apple mobile devices Gemini will be baked into the primary Google app. The first version of Bard used a lighter-model version of Lamda that required less computing power to scale to more concurrent users. The incorporation of the Palm 2 language model enabled Bard to be more visual in its responses to user queries. Bard also incorporated Google Lens, letting users upload images in addition to written prompts. The later incorporation of the Gemini language model enabled more advanced reasoning, planning and understanding.