Google launches its largest and 'most capable' AI model, Gemini

California: In its most ambitious effort to compete in the rapidly growing field of generative artificial intelligence (AI), Google has introduced 'Gemini' as the company's "largest and most capable AI model", CNN reported on Wednesday.

The report stated that Gemini is designed to compete with the likes of OpenAI's GPT models and supercharge everything from Google's consumer apps to Android smartphones and 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, according to CNN.

Google's Gemini model outperformed rival AI models in testing 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.

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".

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

Taking to X, Google CEO Sundar Pichai also shared about the launch of Gemini, posting, "Introducing Gemini 1.0, our most capable and general AI model yet. Built natively to be multimodal, it's the first step in our Gemini-era of models. Gemini is optimised in three sizes - Ultra, Pro, and Nano."

"Gemini Ultra's performance exceeds current state-of-the-art results on 30 of the 32 widely-used academic benchmarks. With a score of 90.0%, Gemini Ultra is the first model to outperform human experts on MMLU," the Google CEO added.