After months of speculation, Google has finally launched Gemini AI, its latest and greatest AI model. Google CEO Sundar Pichai called Gemini “biggest science and engineering efforts we’ve undertaken as a company”. Needless to mention, with Gemini Google hopes to compete with other AI systems, in particular the ChatGPT by OpenAI.

Pichai also said that Gemini is the culmination of eight years of AI work that Google has been doing. He said that Gemini AI will be available in three modes — Ultra, Pro and Nano. As the name suggests in Ultra, Gemini will be utilising the biggest LLM (large language model) to perform its AI tasks. The Pro will use a smaller LLM while the Nano will make use of the smallest LLM. This also opens the possibility that Nano will likely be available to run locally on computers and phones.

“Every technology shift is an opportunity to advance scientific discovery, accelerate human progress, and improve lives. I believe the transition we are seeing right now with AI will be the most profound in our lifetimes, far bigger than the shift to mobile or to the web before it,” Sundar Pichai wrote in a blog.

In the same blog post, Demis Hassabis, CEO and Co-Founder of Google DeepMind, wrote that Gemini even outperforms humans in many language tasks. He wrote: “With a score of 90.0 per cent, Gemini Ultra is the first model to outperform human experts on MMLU (massive multitask language understanding), which uses a combination of 57 subjects such as math, physics, history, law, medicine and ethics for testing both world knowledge and problem-solving abilities.”

Google says it has worked hard to ensure Gemini’s safety and responsibility, both through internal and external testing and red-teaming. Pichai points out that ensuring data security and reliability is particularly important for enterprise-first products, which is where most generative AI makes its money.

Google says that starting this week, Gemini will become part of many Google products and services, including Bard — its AI system that is already available to users. The company says that from today onwards “Bard will use a fine-tuned version of Gemini Pro for more advanced reasoning, planning, understanding and more.”