Google Bard, the company’s generative AI chatbot and ChatGPT rival, is getting an update today that the company claims will significantly boost its capabilities. The company says Bard will now be powered by GeminiGoogle’s newest and most advanced AI model, which gives the chatbot more advanced reasoning, programming, understanding, and other capabilities.
Gemini comes in three sizes, Ultra, Pro and Nano, allowing it to work in everything from mobile devices to data centers.
The launch of Gemini at Bard will take place in two phases. First, Bard will be upgraded with a specially tuned version of Gemini Pro. Next year, Google will introduce Bard Advanced, which will give users access to the best AI model, starting with Gemini Ultra.
Bard with Gemini Pro will initially be available in English in more than 170 countries and territories worldwide, with more languages and countries, including the EU and UK, coming soon.
Before it was released to the public, the Gemini Pro was run through a series of industry standard benchmarks, and in 6 out of 8 of those benchmarks, the Gemini outperformed GPT-3.5, says Google. This includes better performance MMLU, or massive multi-task language understanding tasks, which is one of the key standards for measuring large AI models. It also outperformed GSM8K, which measures elementary school mathematics reasoning. However, as TechCrucnh’s Kyle Wiggers pointed out, GPT-3.5 is over a year old, which makes this launch look more like a cover-up than a better performance.
The improvements will make Bard more adept at things like understanding and summarizing content, reasoning, brainstorming, writing and planning, the company notes.
“This is the biggest quality improvement to Bard since we launched,” said Sissie Hsiao, Vice President and General Manager of Assistant and Bard at Google, when she introduced the Bard upgrade at a press briefing.
Gemini Pro will first enable text-based prompts in Bard to launch, Hsiao said, but will expand to multimodal support — meaning texts and images or other details — in the coming months.
In 2024, Bard Advanced will debut, which will be a new experience powered by Gemini’s most capable model. With Gemini Ultra, as it’s called, the AI can understand and act on different types of information, including text, images, audio, video and code, and has multimodal reasoning capabilities. Gemini Ultra can also understand, explain and generate high-quality code in popular programming languages, Google says, in addition to understanding audio and video content. This upgrade seems to be the one to wait for, in this case.
The company says it will begin a robust testing program for Bard Advanced before opening it up more widely to users early next year. In addition, Google will put Bard Advanced through additional security checks before its release.
The update follows a number of other improvements to Bard since its debut just eight months ago. In recent months, the AI experience has been enhanced with features such as the ability to answer questions about YouTube videos, as well as using users’ Google apps such as Gmail, Docs, Drive and more, as well as other Google services. Google, such as Google Flights and Hotels. It can also double-check its answers to help determine if the AI is “hallucinating” — that is, when it’s providing an answer based on false information.
“Now with Gemini, we’re one step closer to bringing you the world’s best AI partner,” noted Hsiao. This at least seems more honest, as it’s an admission that Bard isn’t there yet.
The Bard with the Twins is available today.
