Google parent unveils advanced Gemini AI model ‘capable of more sophisticated reasoning’

Alphabet on Wednesday introduced its most advanced artificial intelligence model, a technology capable of crunching different forms of information such as video, audio and text.

Called Gemini, the Google owner’s highly anticipated AI model is capable of more sophisticated reasoning and understanding information with a greater degree of nuance than Google’s prior technology, the company said.

“This new era of models represents one of the biggest science and engineering efforts we’ve undertaken as a company,” Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai wrote in a blog post.

Since the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT roughly a year ago, Google has been racing to produce AI software that rivals what the Microsoft-backed company has introduced.

Google added a portion of the new Gemini model technology to its AI assistant Bard on Wednesday, and said it planned to release its most advanced version of Gemini through Bard early next year.

Alphabet said it is making three versions of Gemini, each of which is designed to use a different amount of processing power.

The most powerful version is designed to run in data centers, and the smallest will run efficiently on mobile devices, the company said.

Gemini is the largest AI model that the company’s Google DeepMind AI unit has helped make, but it is “significantly” cheaper to serve to users than the company’s prior, larger models, DeepMind Vice President, Product Eli Collins told reporters.

“So it’s not just more capable, it’s also far more efficient,” Collins said. The latest model still requires a substantial amount of computing power to train, but Google is improving on its process, he added.

Alphabet also announced a new generation of its custom-built AI chips, or tensor processing units (TPUs). The Cloud TPU v5p is designed to train large AI models, and is stitched together in pods of 8,960 chips.

The new version of its customer processors can train large language models nearly three times as fast as prior generations.

The new chips are available for developers in “preview” as of Wednesday, the company said.

Google launches Gemini, its most-advanced AI model yet, as it races to compete with ChatGPT

CNN  — 

Google on Wednesday launched its most ambitious effort yet to compete in the rapidly growing field of generative artificial intelligence, launching an AI model known as Gemini that’s designed to compete with the likes of OpenAI’s GPT models and supercharge everything from Google’s consumer apps to Android smartphones.

The scope of Google’s ambitions were reflected in the company’s announcement, which introduced Gemini as the company’s “largest and most capable AI model” and declared a “Gemini era” that foresees the tech giant’s model being used in every setting, from big companies to consumer devices such as the Google Pixel 8 Pro.

Unlike existing AI models that typically deal with only one type of user prompt, such as exclusively images or text, Gemini was built to be “multimodal,” Google said. This means it accepts inputs that include multiple types of media, combining text, images, audio, video and programming code.

“This new era of models represents one of the biggest science and engineering efforts we’ve undertaken as a company,” said Google CEO Sundar Pichai in a blog post.

Google’s proprietary AI chatbot, Bard, has already been upgraded with a version of the Gemini model, the company said Wednesday, with plans to add Gemini to widely used products including Google’s search engine and Chrome web browser, which are used by billions of people worldwide.

The announcement marks an attempt to reclaim the initiative after Google and other tech giants were apparently caught by surprise a year ago with the sudden and massively popular release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which kicked off an industry-wide scramble to fast-track generative AI tools and a global debate about AI’s risks and benefits.

It also represents an effort to push generative AI out to the farthest reaches of Google’s empire. The company said Gemini 1.0 comes in three different sizes: Nano, which is optimized for mobile devices and app developers; Pro, which is the default model designed for a wide range of tasks and customers; and Ultra, the most sophisticated AI model Google says it has ever built and that is still undergoing safety testing.

Wednesday’s launch was also designed to showcase Google’s advances in cloud computing, a critical resource for AI developers. The company said it trained Gemini using a new generation of powerful cloud-based processors that can collectively train large AI models nearly three times faster than the prior version. That technology, which will also be made available to Google’s cloud customers, could mean a significant boost to the wider AI industry, making AI training more accessible and bolstering Google’s third-place position in the market for public cloud services. But it is unclear how Google’s AI chips stack up against those of leading chipmakers such as Nvidia.

In its testing, Google’s Gemini model outperformed rival AI models across more than two dozen benchmarks commonly used by AI researchers to evaluate an algorithm’s reading comprehension, mathematical ability, and multistep reasoning skills, the company said.

“We do see it setting new kinds of frontiers across the board,” Eli Collins, vice president of product at Google DeepMind, told reporters on a conference call Tuesday.

But he appeared to acknowledge the continued risk of AI models feeding users misleading results, alluding to concerns by civil society groups, policymakers and AI researchers.

Google has done “a lot of work on improving factuality in Gemini,” Collins said, but large language models “are still capable of hallucinating,” a term AI researchers use when AI systems make up facts and get stuff wrong – but with extreme confidence.

“When we integrate these models into products like Bard, we have additional techniques to improve the accuracy of responses,” he added.

In recognition of those risks, Google said Wednesday that Gemini Ultra, its most advanced version of the model, will only be released gradually to “select customers, developers, partners and safety and responsibility experts for early experimentation and feedback before rolling it out to developers and enterprise customers early next year.”

Gemini Ultra is currently undergoing third-party safety evaluations, also known as red-teaming, in accordance with a commitment it made to the Biden administration earlier this summer.

Google Photos Launches Advanced Sharing Features

First announced last month at Google I/O, Google Photos for iOS has now been updated to include several new sharing features, including suggested sharing and shared libraries.

The suggested sharing feature brings with it a new dedicated navigation tab labeled ‘Sharing.’ Here you’ll find a listing of all prior sharing activity, as well as suggestions of photos you haven’t shared yet but may want to. These suggestions are made for one of two reasons: either the photos in question appear similar to images you’ve shared in the past with certain people, so Google thinks you may want to share them, or the photos contain people that Google knows are in your contacts, and thus you may want to share them.

If a Google Photos user shares images with another Google Photos user, and the sharing recipient appears to have photos from the same time and place, Google will suggest adding those images to the shared album. This can be used most effectively when sharing photos around a certain event, like a wedding or vacation. One person may initiate the sharing, but Google Photos makes it easy for the other people who attended the event to improve the shared album by seamlessly adding their own captured memories to it.

The new library sharing features are accessed from the sidebar menu’s ‘Share your library’ option, not the ‘Sharing’ tab. After you’ve selected one or more people to share with, there are a couple settings you can adjust. You can choose to share your entire library, or only photos of specific people. You can also set a time period from which the library sharing should begin – for example, you can set sharing to only happen with all photos from this day on, or from six months ago on, etc.

Google Photos was already an excellent service, but today’s updates make it even better. The automatic library sharing in particular has been on my wish list for Apple Photos for a long time. At the time these features were announced, details about iOS 11 were still unknown, but now that the WWDC unveiling has come and gone without any announced improvements to sharing in Apple Photos, Google Photos is more tempting than ever.