Google Unveils Revolutionary Gemini Upgrade for Bard AI, Promising Unprecedented Multimodal Capabilities

Google has announced an update to its AI chatbot, Bard, which will now incorporate its latest AI model, Gemini. This upgrade promises to enhance Bard's capabilities significantly, offering more advanced reasoning, understanding, and planning. Gemini is available in three versions: Ultra, Pro, and Nano, ensuring compatibility with various platforms, from mobile devices to data centers.

The implementation of Gemini into Bard will occur in two stages. Initially, Bard will integrate a specially adapted version of Gemini Pro. Following this, Google plans to launch Bard Advanced, featuring the superior Gemini Ultra model.

Bard with Gemini Pro will initially be released in English across over 170 countries and regions, with plans to expand to additional languages and regions, including the EU and U.K. Gemini Pro, before public release, outperformed GPT-3.5 in most industry benchmarks, demonstrating superior performance in tasks like language understanding and grade school math reasoning. However, comparisons to the older GPT-3.5 model suggest that Google's update is more about catching up than surpassing its competitors.

The enhancements aim to improve Bard's abilities in content understanding and summarization, brainstorming, writing, and planning. Sissie Hsiao, VP and GM of Assistant and Bard at Google, highlighted this as the most significant quality improvement for Bard since its inception.

Initially, Gemini Pro will be used for text-based prompts in Bard, with plans to incorporate multimodal capabilities, including text and image processing, in the near future. Bard Advanced, set to launch in 2024, will be powered by Gemini Ultra, enabling the AI to process and interact with various information types, including text, images, audio, video, and code, with advanced multimodal reasoning.

Prior to the wider release of Bard Advanced, Google plans to conduct a trusted tester program and additional safety checks. This update is part of a series of enhancements to Bard since its launch eight months ago, including new features like answering YouTube-related queries and integrating with Google services such as Gmail, Docs, Drive, Google Flights, and hotels. These updates aim to make Bard a more reliable and capable AI collaborator, acknowledging that while significant progress has been made, there is still room for improvement.