Google has reportedly begun testing Gemini, its most advanced artificial intelligence model to date, which it says has impressive multimodal capabilities.

Google is preparing to release its much-anticipated conversational AI system, Gemini, setting the stage for an all-out AI battle royale against OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

According to The Information, Google has opened up Gemini's testing to select companies, suggesting that its consumer rollout could be imminent. Gemini is a multimodal LLM, meaning it can natively receive input from different modalities, such as text, images, audio, and more.

"Gemini was built from the ground up to be multi-mode," Google CEO Sundar Pichai said during the Google I/O keynote in May, adding: "It's still early days, but we're already seeing impressive multi-mode capabilities that we haven't seen in previous models."

This will put the tech giant in competition with OpenAI’s hit chatbot, ChatGPT, which has been making a huge splash since its launch in November. Companies from fintech to healthcare have invested heavily to take advantage of its incredible conversational abilities.

But Pichai seemed unperturbed by the prospect of dueling AIs.

When asked if Google should have launched its ChatGPT competitor sooner, Pichai told Wired: "It's not entirely clear to me that it would have been successful as well."

Pichai has been increasing investment in what he calls Google’s “AI-first future” since 2016. But he believes it needs more time to perfect its models before prime time. “I feel very comfortable with where we are,” he said.

Google first launched Bard, a LaMDA-based chatbot, in February, but it flopped a bit after getting basic facts about the James Webb Telescope wrong. But Bard has since been significantly upgraded to take advantage of Google's new multimodal model, PaLM 2, which is "significantly better" than its predecessor, as Decrypt can confirm in a comparison.

The revamped Bard has proven that it can go toe-to-toe with ChatGPT Plus in some areas, while being free and easier to use. Decrypt testing found that Bard provided faster, more contextual translations than ChatGPT. It also crushed the competition when it came to generating code, supporting more than 20 programming languages. But ChatPGT has caught up in this regard with its advanced data analytics tools, which have turned chatbots into powerful coding machines and are now more advanced than Bard's native capabilities.

Bard’s integration with Google’s massive real-time search index gives the chatbot an edge in answering questions about current events. Google is also a major investor in Anthropic, the startup behind Claude AI and ChatGPT’s strongest competitor to date. #谷歌  #Gemini