Google’s generative AI chatbot, Bard, is receiving a significant upgrade with the integration of Gemini, Google’s latest and most advanced AI model.
According to the company, this enhancement will bring advanced reasoning, planning, understanding, and other capabilities to Bard.
Gemini, available in Ultra, Pro, and Nano sizes, is designed to operate on various platforms, from mobile devices to data centers. The rollout of Gemini to Bard will occur in two phases. Initially, Bard will be powered by a tailored version of Gemini Pro. In the following year, Google plans to introduce Bard Advanced, providing users access to the top AI model, starting with Gemini Ultra.
The version of Bard equipped with Gemini Pro will first be available in English in over 170 countries and territories worldwide, with more languages and countries, including the EU and U.K., to follow soon.
Before its public launch, Gemini Pro underwent industry-standard benchmarks, where it outperformed GPT-3.5 in six out of eight benchmarks, including tasks measuring large AI models’ performance in language understanding and grade school math reasoning. However, it’s worth noting that GPT-3.5 is over a year old, making this launch more of a catch-up than a clear outperformance.
The improvements aim to enhance Bard’s capabilities in understanding and summarizing content, reasoning, brainstorming, writing, and planning.
Sissie Hsiao, VP and GM of Assistant and Bard at Google, described the upgrade as the most significant quality improvement since Bard’s launch.
Gemini Pro will initially power text-based prompts in Bard and will later expand to multimodal support, incorporating texts and images or other modalities.
In 2024, Bard Advanced, powered by Gemini Ultra, will debut, providing a new experience with advanced capabilities in understanding and acting on various types of information, including text, images, audio, video, and code, with multimodal reasoning capabilities. Gemini Ultra is also touted to understand, explain, and generate high-quality code in popular programming languages.
Google plans to launch a trusted tester program for Bard Advanced before opening it up more widely to users early next year, subjecting it to additional safety checks.
This update follows several other improvements to Bard in the eight months since its debut, including features like answering questions about YouTube videos, integration with Google apps, and safeguards against AI “hallucination” by cross-checking responses based on false information. Sissie Hsiao acknowledged that with Gemini, Google is one step closer to delivering the world’s best AI collaborator.
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