Google Garners Criticism for Demo After Long Awaited ‘Gemini’ Release – InstantFollowerz

Shortly after news spread that Google was delaying the release of its long-awaited AI model called Gemini, Google announced its launch.

As part of the release, they’ve released a demo that showcases Gemini’s impressive – downright incredible – capabilities. Well, you know what they say about things being too good to be true.

Let’s examine what went wrong with the demo and how it compares to OpenAI.

What is Google Gemini?

Competing with OpenAI GPT-4, Gemini is a multimodal AI model, meaning it can process text, images, audio, and code input.

(For a long time, ChatGPT was unimodal, just processing text, until it switched to multimodality this year.)

Gemini comes in three versions:

• nano: It is the least powerful version of Gemini, designed to run on mobile devices such as phones and tablets. It’s best for simple, everyday tasks like compressing an audio file and writing copy for email.
• Advantages: This version can handle more complex tasks such as language translation and marketing campaign ideas. This is the version that now powers Google AI tools like Bard and Google Assistant.
• Ultra: The largest and most powerful version of Gemini, with access to large data sets and the processing power to complete tasks like solving scientific problems and creating advanced AI applications.

Ultra isn’t yet available to consumers, with a rollout scheduled for early 2024 as Google conducts final tests to ensure it’s safe for commercial use. The Gemini Nano will power Google’s Pixel 8 Pro phone, which has built-in AI features.

Gemini Pro, on the other hand, will run Google tools like Bard starting today and is available via API through Google AI Studio and Google Cloud Vertex AI.

Was Google’s Gemini demo deceptive?

Google released a six-minute YouTube demo that showcases Gemini’s skills in language, game creation, logical and spatial reasoning, cultural understanding, and more.

If you watch the video, you will easily be amazed.

Geminis are able to identify a duck from a simple drawing, understand sleight of hand, and complete visual puzzles—to name just a few tasks.

However, after earning over 2 million views, a Bloomberg report revealed that the video was cut and spliced ​​which inflated Gemini’s performance.

Google shared a disclaimer at the start of the video: “For the purposes of this demo, latency has been reduced and Gemini outputs have been truncated for brevity.”

However, Bloomberg points out that they left out a few important details:

• The video isn’t done in real-time or via voice output, which suggests that conversations won’t be as smooth as shown in the demo.
• The model used in the video is the Gemini Ultra, which is not yet available to the public.

The way Gemini actually processed entries in the demo was through photos and written prompts.

It’s like showing everyone your dog’s best trick.

Share the video via text and everyone is impressed. But when everyone’s done, they see that it actually takes a bunch of treats and cuddles and patience and repetition 100 times to see this trick in action.

Let’s do some side-by-side comparison.

In this 8-second clip, we see someone’s hand gesturing as if playing a game used to settle all friendly disputes. The twins answer: “I know what you’re doing. You’re playing rock-paper-scissors.“

Image source

But what actually happened behind the scenes involved a lot more spoon-feeding.

In the actual demo, the user submitted each hand motion individually and asked Gemini to describe what he saw.

Image source

From there, the user combined all three images, asked Gemini again, and included a big hint.

While it’s still impressive how Gemini can process images and understand context, the video downplays how much control is required for Gemini to generate the right response.

While this has drawn a lot of criticism at Google, some point out that it’s not uncommon for companies to use editing to create more seamless, idealistic use cases in their demos.

Gemini vs. GPT-4

Until now, GPT-4, created by OpenAI, was the most powerful AI model on the market. Since then, Google and other AI players have been working hard to find a model that can beat it.

Google first teased Gemini in September, suggesting it would beat GPT-4, and technically it delivered.

Gemini outperforms GPT-4 in a number of benchmarks set by artificial intelligence researchers.

Image source

However, the Bloomberg article makes an important point.

For a model that took this long to release, the fact that it’s only marginally better than GPT-4 isn’t the huge win Google was aiming for.

OpenAI released GPT-4 in March. Google now releases Gemini, which is better, but only by a few percentage points.

So how long will it take for OpenAI to release an even bigger and better version? Judging by last year, it probably won’t be long.

For now, Gemini seems to be the better option, but that won’t be clear until early 2024 when the Ultra comes out.