Google Gemini: Everything you need to know about the new generative AI platform

Google’s trying to make waves with Gemini, a flagship suite of generative AI models, apps and services. But while Gemini appears to be promising in a few aspects, it’s falling short in others — as our informal review revealed.

So what is Gemini? How can you use it? And how does it stack up to the competition?

To make it easier to keep up with the latest Gemini developments, we’ve put together this handy guide, which we’ll keep updated as new Gemini models and features are released.

What is Gemini?

Gemini is Google’s long-promised, next-gen GenAI model family, developed by Google’s AI research labs DeepMind and Google Research. It comes in three flavors:

• Gemini Ultra, the flagship Gemini model.
• Gemini Pro, a “lite” Gemini model.
• Gemini Nano, a smaller “distilled” model that runs on mobile devices like the Pixel 8 Pro.

All Gemini models were trained to be “natively multimodal” — in other words, able to work with and use more than just words. They were pretrained and fine-tuned on a variety of audio, images and videos, a large set of codebases and text in different languages.

This sets Gemini apart from models such as Google’s own LaMDA, which was trained exclusively on text data. LaMDA can’t understand or generate anything other than text (e.g., essays, email drafts), but that isn’t the case with Gemini models.

What’s the difference between the Gemini apps and Gemini models?

Google, proving once again that it lacks a knack for branding, didn’t make it clear from the outset that Gemini is separate and distinct from the Gemini apps on the web and mobile (formerly Bard). The Gemini apps are simply an interface through which certain Gemini models can be accessed — think of it as a client for Google’s GenAI.

Incidentally, the Gemini apps and models are also totally independent from Imagen 2, Google’s text-to-image model that’s available in some of the company’s dev tools and environments. Don’t worry — you’re not the only one confused by this.

What can Gemini do?

Because the Gemini models are multimodal, they can in theory perform a range of multimodal tasks, from transcribing speech to captioning images and videos to generating artwork. Few of these capabilities have reached the product stage yet (more on that later), but Google’s promising all of them — and more — at some point in the not-too-distant future.

Of course, it’s a bit hard to take the company at its word.

Google seriously underdelivered with the original Bard launch. And more recently it ruffled feathers with a video purporting to show Gemini’s capabilities that turned out to have been heavily doctored and was more or less aspirational.

Still, assuming Google is being more or less truthful with its claims, here’s what the different tiers of Gemini will be able to do once they reach their full potential:

Gemini Ultra

Google says that Gemini Ultra — thanks to its multimodality — can be used to help with things like physics homework, solving problems step-by-step on a worksheet and pointing out possible mistakes in already filled-in answers.

Gemini Ultra can also be applied to tasks such as identifying scientific papers relevant to a particular problem, Google says — extracting information from those papers and “updating” a chart from one by generating the formulas necessary to re-create the chart with more recent data.

Gemini Ultra technically supports image generation, as alluded to earlier. But that capability hasn’t made its way into the productized version of the model yet — perhaps because the mechanism is more complex than how apps such as ChatGPT generate images. Rather than feed prompts to an image generator (like DALL-E 3, in ChatGPT’s case), Gemini outputs images “natively,” without an intermediary step.

Gemini Ultra is available as an API through Vertex AI, Google’s fully managed AI developer platform, and AI Studio, Google’s web-based tool for app and platform developers. It also powers the Gemini apps — but not for free. Access to Gemini Ultra through what Google calls Gemini Advanced requires subscribing to the Google One AI Premium Plan, priced at $20 per month.

The AI Premium Plan also connects Gemini to your wider Google Workspace account — think emails in Gmail, documents in Docs, presentations in Sheets and Google Meet recordings. That’s useful for, say, summarizing emails or having Gemini capture notes during a video call.

Gemini Pro

Google says that Gemini Pro is an improvement over LaMDA in its reasoning, planning and understanding capabilities.

An independent study by Carnegie Mellon and BerriAI researchers found that Gemini Pro is indeed better than OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 at handling longer and more complex reasoning chains. But the study also found that, like all large language models, Gemini Pro particularly struggles with math problems involving several digits, and users have found plenty of examples of bad reasoning and mistakes.

Google’s promised improvements, though — and the first arrived in the form of Gemini 1.5 Pro.

Designed to be a drop-in replacement, Gemini 1.5 Pro (in preview at present) is improved in a number of areas compared with its predecessor, perhaps most significantly in the amount of data that it can process. Gemini 1.5 Pro can (in limited private preview) take in ~700,000 words, or ~30,000 lines of code — 35x the amount Gemini 1.0 Pro can handle. And — the model being multimodal — it’s not limited to text. Gemini 1.5 Pro can analyze up to 11 hours of audio or an hour of video in a variety of different languages, albeit slowly (e.g., searching for a scene in a one-hour video takes 30 seconds to a minute of processing).

Gemini Pro is also available via API in Vertex AI to accept text as input and generate text as output. An additional endpoint, Gemini Pro Vision, can process text and imagery — including photos and video — and output text along the lines of OpenAI’s GPT-4 with Vision model.

Within Vertex AI, developers can customize Gemini Pro to specific contexts and use cases using a fine-tuning or “grounding” process. Gemini Pro can also be connected to external, third-party APIs to perform particular actions.

In AI Studio, there’s workflows for creating structured chat prompts using Gemini Pro. Developers have access to both Gemini Pro and the Gemini Pro Vision endpoints, and they can adjust the model temperature to control the output’s creative range and provide examples to give tone and style instructions — and also tune the safety settings.

Once Gemini Pro exits preview in Vertex, however, the model will cost $0.0025 per character while output will cost $0.00005 per character. Vertex customers pay per 1,000 characters (about 140 to 250 words) and, in the case of models like Gemini Pro Vision, per image ($0.0025).

Let’s assume a 500-word article contains 2,000 characters. Summarizing that article with Gemini Pro would cost $5. Meanwhile, generating an article of a similar length would cost $0.1.

Ultra pricing has yet to be announced.