Not a long time ago, the word “gemini” meant one thing and I knew the meaning by heart because I am Gemini. Today, you need to understand the meaning in the context. Gemini has come short after the OpenAI boom. It is now a strong competitor and, why not, in some aspects even a winner. Whether you are a Gemini or using Gemini, or like me, a Gemini using Gemini, you need to know everything about its power.
Disclosure: The practical information in this article is advised by Gemini and not ChatGPT.
Historical Overview
Google has been building smarter AI for years, particularly in 2013 with the Word2Vec paper, presenting novel model architectures that could map words as mathematical concepts. Not many of us knew about these technologies until 2023 and the launch of Gemini. It is Google’s newest and most powerful creation.
It’s a big step forward because Gemini can now work with different kinds of information, including text, pictures, sounds, videos, and computer code, all at once.
Gemini versions available now:
- Gemini Ultra, the largest model
- Gemini Pro (latest 2.0), Google’s flagship
- Gemini Flash, the fastest version
- Gemini Flash-Lite, smaller and faster than Gemini Flash
- Gemini Flash Thinking, a fast model with reasoning features
- Gemini Nano-1 and Nano-2, small models with Nano-2 running offline
Where You’ll Find Gemini:
Gemini is part of Google, and it means you have it built into many Google products, making them more helpful:
- Google Search: Gemini helps you find better answers by truly understanding what you’re asking, even for complicated questions.
- Gmail and Docs: (My favorite so far), Gemini can help you write emails and documents more easily and quickly, and it can also summarize long texts.
- Google Slides and Sheets: It can assist in making engaging presentations and understanding information in spreadsheets.
- Android Phones: Gemini powers new smart features, like a better voice assistant and helpful suggestions.
- Bard: This is Google’s AI chat service, and Gemini makes it more natural and informative to talk to.
Beyond public availability, the Gemini API lets organizations use its features in their own apps and services.
Gemini Features for Every Need
Gemini is for everyone and every need, and it has much more to offer than answering prompts.
For Regular Users:
- Enhanced Creative Expression: Gemini lets users go beyond basic text generation, completing it with images. It can be an excellent solution to save time and resources for producing visual and text content.
- Smarter Information Discovery: Searching now is less about keywords and more about understanding. You can ask Gemini a complex question, and it will give you information from text, images, and even relevant audio clips (if available) to provide a more comprehensive answer.
- Personalized Learning and Exploration: Gemini can adapt to your learning style and become an always-available teacher, providing explanations in text, diagrams, or even short video examples.
- Better Communication: Now drafting emails or messages is quicker and more effective with Gemini. You can write down your ideas, and AI will create the message. Gemini can help you find the right tone, suggest improvements, and summarize long threads.
- Fun and Engaging Interactions: Gemini can become a friend to help you plan your trip, advise you on what to cook, how to work out, what to read, etc.
For Business/Paid (Workspace) Users:
- Data Analysis and Visualization: AI is best at analyzing data. Gemini goes further and offers insightful visualizations of data with key trends highlighted.
- Content Marketing and Creation: Building a marketing strategy could take tons of resources and time. Now, providing relevant data to Gemini will give strategy ideas, generate engaging product descriptions, create targeted ad copy, and even assist in designing social media campaigns.
- Team Collaboration: Gemini can act as a virtual assistant for teams, transcribing and summarizing meeting minutes, identifying action items, and drafting project proposals in Google Docs and Slides.
- Custom Application Development: Businesses now integrate the Gemini API to build AI-powered applications. For example, it can be a travel app that understands user queries and provides relevant information faster.
- Advanced Code Generation and Debugging: For software development teams, Gemini is used to write code, identify potential bugs, and even understand complex legacy codebases.
Gemini Pricing
Regular users can access Gemini features within Google Search and Bard for free.
- Google One AI Premium: A subscription ($19.99/month) for enhanced Gemini Advanced access across Google services.
- Gemini for Workspace: Integrated into paid Google Workspace plans for businesses.
- Gemini API: For custom apps, businesses pay based on how much data is sent and received.
Comparing Gemini with other Generative AI tools
In just a few years, the market has become so overloaded with all kinds of generative AI tools, image generators, and AI assistants. And yes, competition is high. We will not talk about technical comparison but stick to user experience.
- Native Multimodality: Unlike many other generative AI models that often handle different content types (text, images, etc.) separately, Gemini’s architecture understands and generates content that combines different types of information. This saves time for a user who is not forced to write separate prompts for each content type.
- Integration within the Google Ecosystem: While other tools offer plugins and apps to be separately downloaded to give a full experience, Gemini is an absolute winner for its deep integration within Google’s ecosystem of products and services. For Workspace users, this integration offers immediate productivity.
- Information Retrieval and Synthesis: Google has the largest repository of information. Just imagine we have been feeding Google all kinds of information for years, and now Gemini gives us back all the information, well organized.
Some tech terminology
The latest Gemini 2.0 model outperformed GPT-4 on MMLU (massive multitask language understanding), scoring 90%, while GPT-4 has 86.4%. In reasoning, Gemini also wins with 83.6%. Finally, Gemini shows incredible performance on Python code generation, getting 74.4%, while GPT-4 got 67%.
The Future of Gemini
The future of Gemini is promising for sure. Here is one example. Google has introduced Google Vids to generate high-quality original videos. And this is just the beginning. Future iterations of the technology will be more focused on understanding human emotions for more accurate predictions.
New output modalities: The Gemini 2.0 version is better and faster, and it means developers have more flexibility and control over the Gemini API. These output modalities come in different content forms – text, audio, and images.
As for audio, the new Gemini 2.0 has native speech-to-text audio output, understanding accents and slang.
The model will also help generate better images and refine them through multi-turn editing.
Conclusion: A New Era of Integrated Intelligence
Before all these AI things, we had quite futuristic ideas about the technology era with robots, flying machines, and AI controlling us. Not sure about the control, but I like this type of AI unless I’m on charge. Gemini represents a significant leap beyond traditional language models. We all loved its native multimodality with a richer, more contextual understanding. We are living in a really unimaginable era, and now I imagine the feelings of people first having electricity, cars, airplanes, or phones. And this is just the beginning.