Google wants to surpass ChatGPT with new AI ‘Gemini’.

In the artificial intelligence race, Google wants to take the lead with its new Gemini language model. The AI ​​system must not only keep up with, but also surpass, the GPT4 language model of competitor OpenAI.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai said Wednesday at Gemini’s announcement that the change we experience with AI will be the “most profound in our lifetimes, far greater than the transition to mobile phones or the Internet before that.”

Gemini can not only generate texts in a chatbot, but also solve specific problems and make situation-dependent decisions. It can also record information from photos and videos. Google demonstrated the system with a video chat in which Gemini immediately recognized and correctly classified drawings and hand gestures from its human counterpart.

“We’re bringing Gemini to billions of people through Google products,” announced Google DeepMind head Demis Hassabis. The Google subsidiary was formed in April 2023 from the British start-up DeepMind acquired in 2014 and Google’s internal AI department. By integrating the start-up, which previously operated largely independently, Pichai wanted to bundle the AI ​​efforts within the Google Group in order to compete more effectively with OpenAI.

Google is introducing the new system in three different dimensions: Gemini Ultra, Gemini Pro and Gemini Nano. Gemini Ultra is the largest and most powerful model for very complex tasks. This variant is mainly aimed at business customers.

Gemini Pro will target a broad audience and, for example, teach the Google Bard chatbot “advanced thinking, planning, understanding and more”. “This is the biggest upgrade for Bard since launch,” said Hassabis. Bard will now be available in English in more than 170 countries and territories. However, Google plans to support new languages ​​and locations in the near future.

The third Gemini variant, Nano, brings the system to the top model of Google’s Pixel smartphones. “The Pixel 8 Pro is the first smartphone with Gemini Nano,” Hassabis announced. For example, the Recorder app can record not only spoken language from a long meeting, a lecture or an interview and convert it into written language in real time. With the help of Gemini Nano, the pixel can then create a compact summary without any delay. In the coming months, Gemini will be available in other Google products and services, such as search, ads and the Chrome browser.

Google has been working on applications based on artificial intelligence for years, but is currently under pressure to reveal more. A year ago, the startup OpenAI unleashed new competition in the field of artificial intelligence when it made its chatbot ChatGPT public. The software caused a stir because it can form sentences like a human. Training takes place with enormous amounts of data and estimates, word by word, of how a sentence might proceed. This entails the risk that it may provide completely incorrect information. (sda/awp/dpa)