Google's Gemini Is Impressive But OpenAI Still Leads This Race

Overtaking OpenAI's chatbot upgradations is a major challenge

- PARMY OLSON

The days between Thanksgiving and Christmas are normally a dead zone for launching new technology, but these are desperate times for Alphabet Inc’s Google.

The lumbering search giant was caught on the back-foot by ChatGPT one year ago, and it’s been eager to paint a picture of itself speeding ahead. Last Wednesday, it suddenly announced Gemini, a new AI model that could spot sleight-of-hand magic tricks and ace an accountancy exam. A demonstration video released by Google has wowed social media—but it’s a feat in spin. From a technical standpoint, Google is still chasing OpenAI.

Google released a table showing how Gemini ranks against OpenAI’s top model, GPT-4. It shows Gemini Ultra beating GPT-4 on most standard benchmarks. These test AI models on things like high school physics, professional law and moral scenarios and the current AI race is defined almost entirely by such capabilities.

But on most of the benchmarks, Gemini Ultra beat OpenAI’s GPT-4 model by only a few percentage points. In other words, Google’s top AI model has only made narrow improvements on something that OpenAI completed work on at least a year ago. And Ultra is still under wraps.