When Google launched Bard earlier this year, it was criticised heavily as it made factual errors in its responses frequently. Gradually, Bard’s responses improved and the reports of the AI chatbot making factual errors died down. Now, Google is gearing up to launch its new large language model, Gemini.
As per recent reports, Gemini’s launch was supposed to happen this week. However, that has now been delayed as its responses to certain queries were not up to the mark. Reports also suggest that Gemini might be launched earlier this year. However, nothing has been officially confirmed by Google yet and until that happens, we must take this information with a pinch of salt.
Google’s Gemini launch delayed
As per a report in The Information, Google has discreetly postponed the public introduction of Gemini to January, according to sources familiar with the matter.
Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, recently made the decision to cancel a series of Gemini events originally slated for the upcoming week in California, New York, and Washington. This move comes after the company identified issues with the AI’s reliability in handling certain non-English queries. The planned events, kept under wraps, were intended to be Google’s most significant product launch of the year.
About Gemini
When Gemini was announced at Google’s I/O event in May this year, it was thought to be the tech giant’s answer to OpenAI’s viral AI tool, ChatGPT. Later, DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis also said that Gemini will be more powerful than ChatGPT, whenever it launches.
A Wired report had revealed back then that according to Hassabis, Gemini will be more capable than ChatGPT. He also said that the DeepMind team is using techniques from the AI programme AlphaGo.
AlphaGo, a DeepMind product, emerged as the first computer program to defeat a champion human player in the strategy board game called Go in the year 2016.
“At a high level you can think of Gemini as combining some of the strengths of AlphaGo-type systems with the amazing language capabilities of the large models,” Hassabis was quoted by the publication.
He added, “When Gemini is complete it could play a major role in Google’s response to the competitive threat posed by ChatGPT and other generative AI technology.”
At the time of introducing Gemini, Google had written in a blog post, “We’re already at work on Gemini — our next model created from the ground up to be multimodal, highly efficient at tool and API integrations, and built to enable future innovations, like memory and planning. Gemini is still in training, but it’s already exhibiting multimodal capabilities never before seen in prior models.
“Once fine-tuned and rigorously tested for safety, Gemini will be available at various sizes and capabilities, just like PaLM 2, to ensure it can be deployed across different products, applications, and devices for everyone’s benefit.”
