Technology

What is available now, Gemini Pro, is perhaps better than GPT-3.5. Gemini Ultra is not available yet, and won't be widely available until sometime next year. Ultra is slightly better than GPT-4 on most benchmarks. Not confirmed but it looks like you'll need to pay to access Geminin Ultra through some kind of Bard Advanced interface, probably much like ChatGPT Plus. So in terms of just foundational model quality, Gemini gets Google at a level where they are competing against OpenAI on something like an even playing field.

What is interesting though is this is going to bring more advanced AI to a lot more people. Not a lot of people use ChatGPT regularly, much less who pay for ChatGPT Plus. But tons of people use Google Workspace for their jobs, and Bard with Gemini Pro is built into those applications.

Also Gemini Nano, capable of running locally on android phones, could be interesting.

It will be interesting to see where things go from here. Does Gemini Ultra come out before GPT-4s one year anniversary? Does Google release further Gemini versions next year to try to get and stay ahead of OpenAI? Does OpenAI, being dethroned from their place of having the world's best model plus all the turmoil internally, respond by pushing out GPT-5 to reassert dominance? Do developers move from OpenAI APIs to Gemini, especially given OpenAIs recent instability? Does Anthropic stick with its strategy of offering the most boring and easily offended AI system in the world? Will Google Assistant be useful for anything other than telling me the weather and setting alarms? Many questions to answer in 2024!