Google is currently building an AI system that will outperform ChatGPT, according to Google DeepMind’s CEO Demis Hassabis.
Hassabis told Wired that this system, called "Gemini", is still in development and that it will take several months until its complete. And Gemini's cost could run into the hundreds of millions.
Gemini is expected to work with text and will be similar to ChatGPT-4 in many ways.
But Google doesn’t just want to replicate whatever’s already out there. The CEO said the company’s engineers are using techniques from AlphaGo, the AI that managed to defeat a champion of the board game Go, in order to power Gemini. This should give Gemini planning and problem-solving abilities. Hassabis said that large language model capabilities will then be combined with these skills.
AlphaGo was built using reinforcement learning which is when software makes repeated attempts to solve a task and makes adjustments based on feedback about its performance.
Hassabis and his team might also try to enhance Gemini with ideas from other areas of AI such as robotics and neuroscience.
“We also have some new innovations that are going to be pretty interesting,” Hassabis said.
Gemini was announced during this year’s Google’s I/O conference. Back then the company said, “Gemini was created from the ground up to be multimodal, highly efficient at tool and API integrations and built to enable future innovations, like memory and planning. While still early, we’re already seeing impressive multimodal capabilities not seen in prior models.”
It added that Gemini will be available in various sizes and capabilities.
In April, a Google engineer had written an internal document which got leaked saying the company was losing its edge in AI to the open-source community which is positioned to make rapid adjustments to its lean products. A month later, Google removed its waiting list for its chatbot Bard, its answer to Open AI’s ChatGPT. However, it recently had to delay its European launch due to privacy concerns.
After Bard’s factual mistake while answering a question in its first demo caused parent company Alphabet to lose $100 billion in market value, Google will surely be designing Gemini’s entry to be watertight.
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