Competition between AI providers is growing: Google is now sharpening its AI strategy and making a mobile chatbot and a new language model available to users under the name Gemini. It is a declaration of war on Open AI.
Google is currently trying to turn its AI research into consumer products.
Reuters Staff / Reuters
Google has played a leading role in artificial intelligence (AI) research for years, but since the breakthrough of Chat-GPT, the company has repeatedly been accused of having missed the commercialization of this research.
On Thursday, Google presented how it plans to make money with AI in the future: A new chatbot called Gemini will be available to Google users in the future, both in the browser and via apps for Android and iOS. For example, it should summarize emails, create photos and suggest captions for Google users. The control works via voice and text input.
The chatbot has been available in English in the USA since Thursday (February 8), where it also replaces the Google Assistant on smartphones. Starting next week, the mobile chatbot will also be available in Korean to Google users in the Asia-Pacific region. More languages and regions will follow soon, Google said.
New premium product based on Chat-GPT Pro
While the chatbot is available for free, Google is now also introducing a paid offer with Gemini Advanced. This is based on Google’s largest language model called Ultra 1.0, said the responsible Google manager Sissi Hsiao; This is “the strongest thing currently on the market”. It can help with more complex programming and create better images. From Thursday, users in 150 countries can use it.
The product is very reminiscent of Open AI’s premium offering called Chat-GPT Plus, which is also based on the company’s most powerful language model (GPT-4). Like this, Gemini Advanced also costs around $20 per month in the US. It will also be available in Switzerland (17 francs) and in the EU (21 euros 99) from Thursday, but initially only in English. More languages will follow soon, Google said. Subscribers would then “soon” be able to use the AI in Google’s products for emails, documents and spreadsheets.
In addition, all AI products and models at Google now run under one name: Gemini. Even the previous chatbot Bard was renamed accordingly. The name – “twins” in Latin – goes back to the merger of Google’s AI divisions Google Brain and Deepmind in April last year. It is based on a NASA project of the same name for the moon trip, wrote Jeff Dean, chief scientist of Google’s newly created collaborative AI unit Deepmind, on X at the time.
Gemini is Latin for “twins”.
The Gemini effort came about because we had different teams working on language modeling, and we knew we wanted to start to work together. The twins are the folks in the legacy Brain team (many from the PaLM/PaLM-2 effort) and the legacy DeepMind…
— Jeff Dean (@🏡) (@JeffDean) December 9, 2023
The time and competitive pressure for the tech companies is great
Google’s new offer is a declaration of war on the competition. Apparently the group now wants to make its AI products available to a broader group of customers and thus secure market share and earn money.
How intense the competition between the big technology companies when it comes to AI is increasing is also shown by the fact that Google did not wait until its big “iO” developer conference in May to present the new chatbot to the public; He usually presents exactly such new products. Apparently people in Mountain View didn’t want to watch Open AI, Microsoft and most recently the smartphone manufacturer Samsung dominate the market for AI offerings for another three months.
In the next few months it will be exciting to see how not only Google but also other tech companies bring new AI products onto the market. The Facebook group Meta recently announced that it wanted to be at the forefront of AI and is currently investing enormously in the corresponding infrastructure.
Apple, on the other hand, has so far given little thought to AI. According to reports from Bloomberg, the company was really surprised by the AI boom of the past few months. However, as CEO Tim Cook said in a call with investors last week, Apple also has some “exciting announcements” planned.
The question for Google will be whether it will be able to dominate the market for mobile chatbots in the same way it dominates the search engine market today – or whether users will embrace completely new providers.