Gemini: When AI Meets Google: What Hassabis Thinks about Bard and What OpenAI Can Learn From Its Launch

The case for Bard may have just gotten more compelling, though: as of today, for English-speaking users in 170 countries, Bard is now powered by Google’s new Gemini model, which it says matches and even exceeds OpenAI’s tech in a number of ways. The search engine says that it will be coming to more countries and languages in the future.

The middle tier of the Gemini series is calledGemeins Pro, and is run by Bard. Ultra is the biggest and slowest but the most capable, Nano is small and fast and meant for on-device tasks, and Pro sits right in the middle. It is meant to be the same model as the goldilocks version, but with less speed and efficiency, and still being capable.

Through internal and external testing and red teaming, the company has worked hard to ensure that it is safe. Pichai points out that ensuring data security and reliability is particularly important for enterprise-first products, which is where most generative AI makes its money. But Hassabis acknowledges that one of the risks of launching a state-of-the-art AI system is that it will have issues and attack vectors no one could have predicted. He says that you have to release things so you can see and learn. Hassabis compares the Ultra release to a controlled trial with a “safer experimentation zone” for the most capable and unrecognisable model. Basically, if there’s a marriage-ruining alternate personality inside Gemini, Google is trying to find it before you do.

OpenAI launched ChatGPT a year and a week ago, and the company and product immediately became the biggest things in AI. The company that created much of the technology behind the current artificial intelligence boom, that has called itself an “ai-first” organization for nearly a decade, was embarrassed and caught off guard by how good OpenAI was and how fast chatGPT was.

Talking to Pichai and Hassabis, it’s clear that they see the Gemini launch both as the beginning of a larger project and as a step change in itself. Gemini is the model Google has been waiting for, the one it has been building toward for years, maybe even the one it should have had ready before OpenAI and ChatGPT took over the world.