What is Google’s Gemini AI tool formerly Bard? Everything you need to know

If you’re enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. / Sign up for Verge Deals to get deals on products we’ve tested sent to your inbox weekly. During a demonstration, Google executives showed how people can interact with Gemini using text, speech and images.

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.

When Bard became available, Google gave no indication that it would charge for use. Google has no history of charging customers for services, excluding enterprise-level usage of Google Cloud. The assumption was that the chatbot would be integrated into Google’s basic search engine, and therefore be free to use. At its release, Gemini was the most advanced set of LLMs at Google, powering Bard before Bard’s renaming and superseding the company’s Pathways Language Model (Palm 2).

According to Google, Gemini underwent extensive safety testing and mitigation around risks such as bias and toxicity to help provide a degree of LLM safety. To help further ensure Gemini works as it should, the models were tested against academic benchmarks spanning language, image, audio, video and code domains. Unlike prior AI models from Google, Gemini is natively multimodal, meaning it’s trained end to end on data sets spanning multiple data types. As a multimodal model, Gemini enables cross-modal reasoning abilities.

• Both use an underlying LLM for generating and creating conversational text.
• However, there are age limits in place to comply with laws and regulations that exist to govern AI.
• In other countries where the platform is available, the minimum age is 13 unless otherwise specified by local laws.
• For example, someone with a flat tyre could take a picture of the mishap to ask for advice.
• Then, in December 2023, Google upgraded Gemini again, this time to Gemini, the company’s most capable and advanced LLM to date.

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 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.

Is Gemini free to use?

That meandering quality can quickly stump modern conversational agents (commonly known as chatbots), which tend to follow narrow, pre-defined paths. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. Then, as part of the initial launch of Gemini on Dec. 6, 2023, Google provided direction on the future of its next-generation LLMs. While Google announced Gemini Ultra, Pro and Nano that day, it did not make Ultra available at the same time as Pro and Nano. Initially, Ultra was only available to select customers, developers, partners and experts; it was fully released in February 2024. The propensity of Gemini to generate hallucinations and other fabrications and pass them along to users as truthful is also a cause for concern.

After all, the phrase “that’s nice” is a sensible response to nearly any statement, much in the way “I don’t know” is a sensible response to most questions. Satisfying responses also tend to be specific, by relating clearly to the context of the conversation. It can be literal or figurative, flowery or plain, inventive or informational. That versatility makes language one of humanity’s greatest tools — and one of computer science’s most difficult puzzles.

Google intends to improve the feature so that Gemini can remain multimodal in the long run. It can translate text-based inputs into different languages with almost humanlike accuracy. Google plans to expand Gemini’s language understanding capabilities and make it ubiquitous. However, there are important factors to consider, such as bans on LLM-generated content or ongoing regulatory efforts in various countries that could limit or prevent future use of Gemini. That new bundle from Google offers significantly more than a subscription to OpenAI’s ChatGPT Plus, which costs $20 a month.

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 Engineer Claims AI Chatbot Is Sentient: Why That Matters

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 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.

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. Rebranding the platform as Gemini some believe might have been done to draw attention away from the Bard moniker and the criticism the chatbot https://chat.openai.com/ 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.

Gemini’s double-check function provides URLs to the sources of information it draws from to generate content based on a prompt. LaMDA builds on earlier Google research, published in 2020, that showed Transformer-based language models trained on dialogue could learn to talk about virtually anything. Since then, we’ve also found that, once trained, LaMDA can be fine-tuned to significantly improve the sensibleness and specificity of its responses. Our highest priority, when creating technologies like LaMDA, is working to ensure we minimize such risks. We’re deeply familiar with issues involved with machine learning models, such as unfair bias, as we’ve been researching and developing these technologies for many years. Gemini is also getting more prominent positioning among Google’s services.

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.

As of Dec. 13, 2023, Google enabled access to Gemini Pro in Google Cloud Vertex AI and Google AI Studio. For code, a version of Gemini Pro is being used to power the Google AlphaCode 2 generative AI coding technology. A key challenge for LLMs is the risk of bias and potentially toxic content.

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 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.

The name change also made sense from a marketing perspective, as Google aims to expand its AI services. It’s a way for Google to increase awareness of its advanced LLM offering as AI democratization and advancements show no signs of slowing. Gemini’s latest upgrade to Gemini should have taken care of all of the issues that plagued the chatbot’s initial release.

Apple doesn’t understand why you use technology

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.

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.

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 aim is to simplify the otherwise tedious software development tasks involved in producing modern software. While it isn’t meant for text generation, it serves as a viable alternative to ChatGPT or Gemini for code generation. Anthropic’s Claude is an AI-driven chatbot named after the underlying LLM powering it. It has undergone rigorous testing to ensure it’s adhering to ethical AI standards and not producing offensive or factually inaccurate output. One concern about Gemini revolves around its potential to present biased or false information to users.

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.

We’re also exploring dimensions like “interestingness,” by assessing whether responses are insightful, unexpected or witty. Google Gemini works by first being trained on a massive corpus of data. After training, the model uses several neural network techniques to be able to understand content, answer questions, generate text and produce outputs. Kambhampati also says Google’s claim that 100 AI experts were impressed by Gemini is similar to a toothpaste tube boasting that “eight out of 10 dentists” recommend its brand.

Rebranding Bard also creates a more cohesive structure for Google’s AI tools, naming many of the products after the engine that powers them. One tricky part of AI chatbots is figuring out where they got their information. That opacity makes it hard to verify facts, attribute information to appropriate sources and generally understand why a chatbot offered the results it did. But modern chatbots also are prone to making up data, and their backers are working hard to keep them from contributing to problems like abuse, misinformation, hacking and sexual harassment. Today’s AI is powerful enough to trigger fears about wiping out white-collar jobs and undermining civilization.

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.

The service includes access to the company’s most powerful version of its chatbot and also OpenAI’s new “GPT store,” which offers custom chatbot functions crafted by developers. For the same monthly cost, Google One customers can now get extra Gmail, Drive, and Photo storage in addition to a more powerful google’s chatbot chat-ified search experience. Less than a week after launching, ChatGPT had more than one million users. According to an analysis by Swiss bank UBS, ChatGPT became the fastest-growing ‘app’ of all time. Other tech companies, including Google, saw this success and wanted a piece of the action.

Gemini models have been trained on diverse multimodal and multilingual data sets of text, images, audio and video with Google DeepMind using advanced data filtering to optimize training. As different Gemini models are deployed in support of specific Google services, there’s a process of targeted fine-tuning that can be used to further optimize a model for a use case. Gemini, formerly known as Bard, is a generative artificial intelligence chatbot developed by Google. It was previously based on PaLM, and initially the LaMDA family of large language models. Chatbots have been around since Eliza from the 1960s, but new artificial intelligence technologies like large language models and generative AI have made them profoundly more useful. LLMs are trained to spot patterns across vast collections of text from the internet, books and other sources, and generative AI can use that analysis to respond to text prompts with human-sounding written conversation.

• Gemini’s latest upgrade to Gemini should have taken care of all of the issues that plagued the chatbot’s initial release.
• Regardless of what LaMDA actually achieved, the issue of the difficult “measurability” of emulation capabilities expressed by machines also emerges.
• It will have its own app on Android phones, and on Apple mobile devices Gemini will be baked into the primary Google app.
• Google hopes to help with this problem with an improvement coming soon, initially with responses involving programming code.
• Google initially announced Bard, its AI-powered chatbot, on Feb. 6, 2023, with a vague release date.

It might be difficult for users to notice the leaps forward Google says its chatbot has taken. Subbarao Kambhampati, a professor at Arizona State University who focuses on AI, says discerning significant differences between large language models like those behind Gemini and ChatGPT has become difficult. “We have basically come to a point where most LLMs are indistinguishable on qualitative metrics,” he points out. ZDNET’s recommendations are based on many hours of testing, research, and comparison shopping.

Thanks to Ultra 1.0, Gemini Advanced can tackle complex tasks such as coding, logical reasoning, and more, according to the release. One AI Premium Plan users also get 2TB of storage, Google Photos editing features, 10% back in Google Store rewards, Google Meet premium video calling features, and Google Calendar enhanced appointment scheduling. On February 8, Google introduced the new Google One AI Premium Plan, which costs $19.99 per month, the same as OpenAI’s and Microsoft’s premium plans, ChatGPT Plus and Copilot Pro. With the subscription, users get access to Gemini Advanced, which is powered by Ultra 1.0, Google’s most capable AI model. Yes, as of February 1, 2024, Gemini can generate images leveraging Imagen 2, Google’s most advanced text-to-image model, developed by Google DeepMind. All you have to do is ask Gemini to “draw,” “generate,” or “create” an image and include a description with as much — or as little — detail as is appropriate.

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.

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.

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.

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.

When Bard was first introduced last year it took longer to reach Europe than other parts of the world, reportedly due to privacy concerns from regulators there. The Gemini AI model that launched in December became available in Europe only last week. In a continuation of that pattern, the new Gemini mobile app launching today won’t be available in Europe or the UK for now. In ZDNET’s experience, Bard also failed to answer basic questions, had a longer wait time, didn’t automatically include sources, and paled in comparison to more established competitors.

Google DeepMind makes use of efficient attention mechanisms in the transformer decoder to help the models process long contexts, spanning different modalities. Google’s chatbot, which had been known as Bard and was its answer to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, will now be called Gemini. A version will continue to be available for free, but people willing to pay US$19.99 for a monthly subscription will gain access to Google’s most advanced tool in its Gemini family of AI models, the Ultra 1.0. 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. The Ultra model is the top end and is designed for highly complex tasks.

For example, users can ask it to write a thesis on the advantages of AI. Both are geared to make search more natural and helpful as well as synthesize new information in their answers. Gemini offers other functionality across different languages in addition to translation. For example, it’s capable of mathematical reasoning and summarization in multiple languages.

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.

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.

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.

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 Chat PG 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.