Google Gemini: Could this be the ChatGPT killer?
BBC Science Focus|March 2024
Google is working on a model to take on OpenAl. But is it good enough?
Google Gemini: Could this be the ChatGPT killer?

In 2023, ChatGPT took off. The online artificial intelligence (AI) tool became so big that even your uncle who doesn't own a smartphone knew about it. But as its owners, OpenAI, continue to polish and improve their prodigy, there's a competitor ready to take over.

Soon after the launch of ChatGPT, Google announced it was working on its own AI tool, Bard. A rival to Open Al's offering, Bard could do all the things ChatGPT could, but with the might of the world's largest search engine behind it.

Now, Google is taking another step forward with its latest AI project: Google Gemini. Currently being rolled out, Gemini is claimed to already be outperforming ChatGPT and it's left plenty of us wondering if Google will take the AI top spot in 2024.

WHAT IS GEMINI AND HOW DOES IT WORK?

When it comes to AI, the application that everyone knows about is ChatGPT. But for that tool to work it needs to be powered by something, that's where GPT-4 comes in. A large language model, GPT-4 is trained on billions of sets of data from the internet to understand images, texts, context and many other factors.

Gemini is to Google what GPT-4 is to OpenAI; it's the artificial intelligence that runs programs like ChatGPT or, in the Case of Google, Bard. Built from the ground up and using teams from across Google, Gemini can generalise and understand content, including text, code, audio, image and video. Like GPT4, Gemini was trained on a massive dataset, including books, articles, code repositories, music, audio recordings and other forms of media.

All this data is broken down into a form that's more understandable to Gemini. The model then learns the relationships between different terms and media, learning how to respond to prompts, questions and proposals.

HOW TO TRY GOOGLE GEMINI FOR FREE

This story is from the March 2024 edition of BBC Science Focus.

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This story is from the March 2024 edition of BBC Science Focus.

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