Google is launching a new initiative called Gemini in an attempt to compete with OpenAI's ChatGPT and Microsoft's rapidly-developing tools, the American technology industry-focused business publication The Information reported on Thursday.
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The new AI technology is a collaborative project by Google Brain - a research division at Google dedicated to artificial intelligence, and DeepMind - a subsidiary of Google.
DeepMind Technologies, one of the leading developers of artificial general intelligence (AGI) technology, was founded in 2010 and acquired by Google in 2014. Nonetheless, the London-based AI company operates almost independently of Google. It recently developed its own chatbot called Sparrow, designed to be faster and more cost-effective than ChatGPT, and CEO Demis Hassabis said a private beta version could be released in 2023.
Google, considered to be among the leading players in the field of AI, seems to be working hard towards catching up to OpenAI. In 2017, researchers from Google Brain presented an innovative model called the Transformer," on the same basis of which the OpenAI GPT language model was later developed. Transformer also served as the foundation for the large language model of LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications), created to enable software to better engage in a fluid and natural conversation.
All of these breakthrough inventions led up to the conversational AI developed by Google, Bard, which uses the former technologies to generate human-like text responses to various prompts.
It was made available on March 21, 2023, and is currently open to the general public via a waiting list. Its users as of now consist primarily of a small audience in the U.S. and the U.K.
According to The Information, the Gemini project has urged Google and DeepMind to reconcile after years of hostility. Despite disagreements mostly surrounding ethical oversight, the two realized their aspirations to develop their own GPT-4 competitors would require enormous amounts of computing power.
Therefore, in what seems to be an understanding that to keep up with OpenAI and Microsoft the two companies must join forces, they decided to move past their issues.
Away from Gemini, Google is continuing to push the development of Bard and is expected to merge it with Google Assistant, according to a report. The company also plans to bring generative AI to Gmail, Docs, Slides, and other products and is making its own AI models available to developers via the cloud.