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Google AI

Google Just Unveiled Gemini (wired.com) 32

Increasing talk of AI developing with potentially dangerous speed is hardly slowing things down. A year after OpenAI launched ChatGPT and triggered a new race to develop AI technology, Google today revealed an AI project intended to reestablish the search giant as the world leader in AI. From a report: Gemini, a new type of AI model that can work with text, images, and video, could be the most important algorithm in Google's history after PageRank, which vaulted the search engine into the public psyche and created a corporate giant.

An initial version of Gemini starts to roll out today inside Google's chatbot Bard for the English language setting. It will be available in more than 170 countries and territories. Google says Gemini will be made available to developers through Google Cloud's API from December 13. A more compact version of the model will from today power suggested messaging replies from the keyboard of Pixel 8 smartphones. Gemini will be introduced into other Google products including generative search, ads, and Chrome in "coming months," the company says. The most powerful Gemini version of all will debut in 2024, pending "extensive trust and safety checks," Google says.

"It's a big moment for us," Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, told WIRED ahead of today's announcement. "We're really excited by its performance, and we're also excited to see what people are going to do building on top of that." Gemini is described by Google as "natively multimodal," because it was trained on images, video, and audio rather than just text, as the large language models at the heart of the recent generative AI boom are. "It's our largest and most capable model; it's also our most general," Eli Collins, vice president of product for Google DeepMind, said at a press briefing announcing Gemini.

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Google Just Unveiled Gemini

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  • Trust is the issue (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Wednesday December 06, 2023 @10:31AM (#64060075)

    The most powerful Gemini version of all will debut in 2024, pending "extensive trust and safety checks," Google says

    Nothing Google does inspires trust, and the last thing I will trust is some programmatic semi-smart Google avatar doing god-knows-what on my phone with my data.

    Hard pass.

    • by Rei ( 128717 )

      I tried it out with some logic / linguistic problems. ChatGPT did better. Doesn't seem bad, just doesn't seem to be a ChatGPT-beater.

      • I tried it out with some logic / linguistic problems. ChatGPT did better. Doesn't seem bad, just doesn't seem to be a ChatGPT-beater.

        Exactly no one is standing around bragging about how horses are better than the worst 4-cylinder engine, because every engine is more powerful than a horse. And it hardly took decades to argue that fact. We went from driving a car to driving a lunar rover within a single human career. Went from Ford Model T's to Tesla Model S's rolling off a line within a single human lifetime.

        I'm not sure when this argument will become completely pointless but knowing human ignorance its going to happen a lot sooner tha

      • by Hodr ( 219920 )

        How did you try it out when it won't be made available until the 13th? Are you writing us from the future?

    • Nothing Google does inspires trust

      That's nonsense. I don't like everything Google does, but they've hosted my email and various files securely for coming up on two decades, they make some of the cleanest Android phones on the market with regularly published factory images, OTAs, and verification mechanisms, they offer Workspace products for corporate that seem to be fairly secure - you don't often hear of massive breaches, their security team often does valuable work not only on their own products but also on other vendor's products. And th

  • His last words were rather ominous. "The little computer knew then that computers would always grow wiser and more powerful until someday—someday—someday—"

    • And where's the Golden Fleece?

      Should we assume the name implies a bond between the mortal and the immortal . Or is it meant to imply it's the son of Zeus , king of the gods? Unlike the Christian gods. The Greek gods were not overly concern with humanity other than it being their plaything. "I'm gonna dress up as a goose and get me a woman tonight!" Was always good for a laugh on mount Olympus.

  • by war4peace ( 1628283 ) on Wednesday December 06, 2023 @11:33AM (#64060311)

    I opened Bard webpage, typed:
    "When is Gemini going to be rolled out?"
    Bard answered:
    "Please clarify the specific product or service you are referring to by "Gemini." There are multiple applications and services with the name Gemini. Here are a few examples:
    Gemini Exchange: A cryptocurrency exchange platform that is currently available to users in select regions. There is no official date set for a global rollout.
    Gemini Spacecraft: A planned private human spaceflight program that is still in development. There is no official date set for the first launch.
    Gemini (chat app): A social media messaging app that is currently available on iOS and Android. There are no plans for a wider rollout at this time.
    If you are referring to a different product or service, please provide more context so I can provide an accurate answer."

    Then I provided Bard the reference article from Slashdot:
    "Gemini reference: https://tech.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]"
    And Bard answered:
    "I'm just a language model, so I can't help you with that."

    Ermahgerd, AI will take over! /sarcasm

    • Look at the headline of this article - it would have failed the fifth grade journalism unit.

      Maybe an AI wrote it?

      • by Puls4r ( 724907 )
        Don't even ask me how many times I had to read this sentence in the article to have it make sense.

        "A more compact version of the model will from today power suggested messaging replies from the keyboard of Pixel 8 smartphones."

        My 8th grade english teacher would have circled that in red and written "ACKWARD" in huge letters.
  • by ZiggyZiggyZig ( 5490070 ) on Wednesday December 06, 2023 @11:33AM (#64060313)

    I can't help but wonder what will happen when those tools will eventually replace search engines. It had already begun with social networks that people stopped visiting websites, relying instead on the social networks' interfaces to find content; now this tool will treat the whole web like it is a database, and just return relevant results to users without any need (and possibility) for them to go to any website to check the source.

    Are content creators, and more specifically webmasters, happy to become database operators, without any interaction and feedback from the people who use their information?

    Am I clinging to an outdated view of the web?

    • This is why people cannot have nice things forever.

      I remember way back when that the WWW was sold to us a medium for communicating with humans from across the globe in a nigh-seamless fashion. The idea being that we could form communities irrespective of the geographical boundaries that physically separated us.

      Nowadays it seems like we want to push humans further and further out of the WWW while turning it into a glorified botnet. SEO trends absolutely flooded the web with garbage well before this current A

      • companies like google are hemorrhaging ad money so they desperately look for the next big thing to profit off of.

        It's closer to the opposite [statista.com]. Google had been a leader in LLM's but slow to push it out to users because it's a threat to their business. Life can hardly get better than it has been for them. But now the threat of a technological revolution is forcing their hand. Kinda like how Microsoft never wanted to create mobile that was untethered from the desktop, because that was their bread and butt

        • Conversational AI is a threat to pretty much every content creator on the web in part because it can redirect traffic away from websites/pages. If Google is a sinking ship, then we are all the passengers going for the last remaining lifeboats.

          No need to visit a site for info or images if the AI just pulls it from them in the first place on behalf of the user. The OP already put it more or less succinctly.

          I have no love for google, but this is not just the middle man being cut out but also all the users that

    • Video has already displaced much of the former importance of the web.

      And, yes, I know youtube.com is indeed still a website, but the web protocols etc. are pretty inconsequential to delivering content on that platform. 99% (?) of the bandwidth is streaming video, and youtubers aren't sitting around learning to code HTML.

  • I wonder if Gemini people will be able to defend their protocol ? Or as par for the case, google will bury gemini with lawsuit dollars ? Or is this a non-issue ? I kind of doubt it based upon the history of lawsuits from LArge Companies.

    https://geminiprotocol.net/

  • by VeryFluffyBunny ( 5037285 ) on Wednesday December 06, 2023 @12:37PM (#64060601)
    Re: "A more compact version of the model will from today power suggested messaging replies from the keyboard of Pixel 8 smartphones." - How would you feel about someone sending you auto-generated replies? Would you bother to read them?

    "My phone sends its condolences on this tragic day for you & your family."
    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      People have been sending auto-generated replies since the old dumbphone days, thanks to predictive text.

      • Not the same thing. Think about the context, intentions, the attitude of the message sender, & the perception of the receiver of that message.

        If you knew that FluffyBunny were an AI bot, would you still engage with it in the same way or differently? How would your attitude change?
  • One more artificial moron with hallucinations that is good at basically nothing. Who cares.

  • "Google says Gemini will be made available to developers through Google Cloud's API from December 13."
    How many of us have invested considerable time implementing something from Google, only to have it abandoned?
  • ...Google graveyard [killedbygoogle.com] in 3, 2, 1,...
  • I distrust all players in this space equally.

    So, I am not feeding it information I do not want anyone to know. And when it comes down to it, I have very little information I don't anyone to know. I primarily use AI as a software development assistant. And it is OK with me if they steal all of my code. I don't consider it a secret. What is not OK is that the AI software development tool spits out utter garbage. And that is what Google's AI does. OpenAI is so far ahead of Google that it is not even fun

  • It feels to me there is a lot of "mee too!" "we can do it too" undertones.

The goal of Computer Science is to build something that will last at least until we've finished building it.

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