Google to postpone Gemini, ChatGPT’s arch-enemy, until January

These last weeks of 2023 might’ve been chock-full of ChatGPT-related news because of the chaotic drama surrounding Sam Altman. But let’s check on Google and see how far they’ve come with their answer to ChatGPT.

Remember Gemini? That’s the name Google gave its latest AI project, the one the search engine giant announced at the I/O 2023 conference.

It turns out that Google has decided not to run Gemini in December, as apparently was the plan, but to postpone it until January 2024 (via 9to5Google). As per The Information, Google’s answer to ChatGPT was supposed to get a major reveal this week with a series of events in California, New York, and Washington.

What happened?

The report claims that none other than Sundar Pichai decided to delay the launch after Google “found the AI didn’t reliably handle some non-English queries.” Global language support is top of mind, with Google ultimately aiming to match or surpass OpenAI’s GPT-4.

Google’s CEO recently said that the company is “focused on getting Gemini 1.0 out as soon as possible, make sure it’s competitive, state of the art, and we’ll build from there on.” At the moment, Google is said to still be “finalizing the primary, biggest version of Gemini”.

Google DeepMind CEO and his team (which are working on Gemini) are ‘aiming to give the system new capabilities such as planning or the ability to solve problems’, which will be an interesting turn of events if executed correctly. The AI division is also looking for ways to enhance the LLM technology (large language model - the deep learning algorithm that can recognize, summarize and generate text) with ideas from other areas of AI.