Artificial intelligence has become this year’s wonder technology. But because it comes in a lot of different flavors from a lot of different companies, it can be really confusing. You’ve not only got the ChatGPT bot created by OpenAI, but you’ve got the big three — Google, Apple, and Microsoft — cooking up their own versions. Google’s latest attempt is called Gemini, and it’s no less confusing than the others. When I first started researching Gemini, I did a Google search for “versions of Google Gemini.” On top of the search, I got an AI-generated summary that started: “Google Gemini has three versions: Ultra, Pro, and Nano. Ultra is the largest model and is designed for complex tasks, while Pro is the best model for scaling across a wide range of tasks, and Nano is the most efficient model for on-device tasks.” Okay, good enough. But it’s not the complete story. Gemini is the third zodiac sign, associated with the twins Castor and Pollux from Greek mythology. Okay, sorry. I couldn’t resist. Gemini is a chatbot created by Google that has replaced its previous chatbot named Bard. It’s based on something called a large language model (or LLM), also called Gemini, which was developed by DeepMind, a part of Google. How much time do you have? Seriously, though, we’re going to limit ourselves to the types of Gemini that you may encounter because the number of iterations feel endless. Originally, when it was introduced in December 2023, Gemini offered three different versions (known as models): Nano as a lightweight Android version, Pro for everyday wear, and Ultra for heavyweight business / enterprise usage. Then on May 14th, during its I/O 2024 event, Google introduced Gemini 1.5 Pro, the first in what the company called a “mid-sized multimodal model.” According to Google, the new version of Pro is about as powerful as the previous Ultra version and is meant to enhance existing apps and create new ones for day-to-day uses.
Full explainer : Everything you want to know about Google’s Gemini AI.
