Google Upgrades Bard Chatbot With New Gemini AI Model
Google integrates its new Gemini AI model into Bard, promising major improvements in reasoning and planning. The update initially brings a tailored Gemini Pro version to the chatbot, with a more powerful Ultra model planned for next year.
Google updates its Bard chatbot with Gemini, the company's newest and most advanced AI model, claiming this is the biggest quality improvement since the chatbot's original launch. This integration gives Bard enhanced capabilities in reasoning, planning, understanding, and content creation. The Gemini model comes in three sizes—Ultra, Pro, and Nano—allowing it to operate across devices ranging from smartphones to large data centers.
The rollout occurs in two distinct phases, starting today with a specifically tuned version of Gemini Pro powering text-based prompts in English across over 170 countries. Google reports that Gemini Pro outperforms OpenAI's GPT-3.5 in six out of eight standard industry benchmarks, including massive multitask language understanding and grade school math reasoning. However, critics point out that since GPT-3.5 is over a year old, this upgrade feels more like Google catching up to the competition rather than leaping ahead.
Next year, Google plans to introduce Bard Advanced, a new premium experience powered by Gemini Ultra. This top-tier model features full multimodal reasoning capabilities, allowing the AI to understand and act on text, images, audio, video, and code simultaneously. Until then, the current Gemini Pro integration will expand beyond text to support multimodal inputs like images in the coming months.