These Are the Biggest Differences Between Google Gemini and ChatGPT – Lifehacker
AI chatbots are more popular than ever, and there are plenty of solid options out there to choose from beyond OpenAI’s ChatGPT. One particularly strong competitor is Google’s Gemini AI, which used to be called Google Bard. This AI chatbot pulls information from the internet and runs off the latest Gemini language model created by Google.
Bard, or Gemini as the company has now begun calling it, is Google’s answer to ChatGPT. It’s an AI chatbot designed to respond to various queries and tasks, all while offering the latest AI language model to work off of. Like most other chatbots, including ChatGPT, Gemini can answer math problems and help with writing articles and documents, as well as most other tasks you expect a generative AI bot to accomplish.
Nothing happened—Google just changed the name. Bard is now Gemini, and Gemini is Google’s home for all things AI. The company says it wanted to bring everything into one easy-to-follow ecosystem, which is why it felt the name change was important. You can still access Gemini through the old bard.google.com system, but it will now redirect you to gemini.google.com.
Much like ChatGPT, Gemini is powered by a large language model (LLM) and is designed to respond with reasonable and human-like answers to your queries and requests. Previously, Gemini used Google’s PaLM 2 language model, but Google has since released an update that adds Gemini Pro, the search giant’s most complex and capable language model yet. Running Gemini with two different language models has allowed Google to see the bot in action in several different ways. Gemini can be accessed on any device by visiting the chatbot’s website, just like ChatGPT.
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Gemini is currently available to the general public via an experimental beta. Google is still hard at work on the AI chatbot and hopes to continue improving it. As such, any responses, queries, or tasks submitted to Gemini will be reviewed by Google engineers to help the AI learn more from the questions that you’re asking.
To start using Gemini, simply head over to gemini.google.com and sign in.
Gemini currently supports over 40 languages. Google hasn’t said yet if it plans to add more language support to the chatbot, but a Google support doc notes that it currently supports: Arabic, Bengali, Bulgarian, Chinese (Simplified / Traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Farsi, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Gujarati, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Kannada, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malayalam, Marathi, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, and Vietnamese.
(Note: At the time of this article’s writing, Google Gemini Advanced is only optimized for English. However, Google says it should still work with any languages Gemini supports.)
Like ChatGPT, Gemini can answer basic questions, help with coding, and solve complex mathematic equations. Additionally, Google added support for multimodal search in July, allowing users to input pictures as well as text into the chatbot. This, along with the other capabilities of the chatbot, allows the bot to complete reverse image searches. Google can also include images in its answers, which are pulled from the search giant’s online results.
Google also recently added the ability to generate images in Gemini using its Imagen model. You can take advantage of this new feature by telling the bot to “create an image.” This makes the chatbot more competitive with ChatGPT, which also offers image generation.
Yes, Google Gemini is connected to the internet. The chatbot has actually had internet access more widely available than ChatGPT, meaning that the model is trained on the latest and most up-to-date information found on the internet. This is obviously a nice advantage over ChatGPT, which just added full access to the internet in recent months, but it also introduces some possible room for misinformation.
Now that the chatbot is using Gemini Pro, it’s expected to be one of the most accurate chatbots available on the web right now. However, past experiences with Gemini have shown that the bot is likely to hallucinate or take credit for information that it found via Google searches. This is a problem that Google has been working hard to fix, and it has managed to improve the results and how they are handled exceptionally well over the past few months. However, like any chatbot, Gemini is still capable of creating information that is untrue or plagiarized. As such, it is always recommended you double-check any information that chatbots like Gemini provide, to ensure it is original and accurate.
Gemini is currently free to use, but Google also offers a subscription-based system that allows you to take advantage of its best AI yet, Gemini Advanced. The service is available as part of Google’s new Google One AI Premium Plan, which currently runs for $19.99 a month, putting it on par with ChatGPT Plus. The advantage here, of course, is that you also get access to 2TB of storage in Google Drive, as well as access to Gemini in Gmail, Docs, Slides, Sheets, and more. This feature was previously known as Duet AI, but it has also been rounded up under the Gemini Umbrella.
Google is also launching a dedicated Gemini mobile app, which rolls out to Android today. Google will be rolling out a similar experience in the Google app on iOS in the coming days or weeks. Currently, the Gemini mobile app is only available on select devices and it only supports English in the U.S. However, Google plans to extend the available countries and languages the Gemini app supports in the future. Additionally, the mobile app already supports a lot of the same functions as the Google Assistant, so it is likely we’ll see the two combine together sometime in the future.
Gemini is a solid competitor for ChatGPT, especially now that Gemini should bring results more akin to GPT-4 into the chatbot. The interface is very similar, and the functionality offered by both chatbots should handle most of the queries and tasks that you throw at either of them. Google’s recent introduction to a paid plan still leaves it as a more accessible option, since Gemini Pro is still more akin to GPT-4 than ChatGPT’s free option is. You’ll also always get the most up-to-date information thanks to Gemini’s internet access, even if you’re using the free version. To connect ChatGPT to the internet right now, you’d either need to utilize Copilot, which uses GPT-4 with Bing search, or subscribe to ChatGPT Plus. ChatGPT Plus subscriptions have opened again, thankfully, but it’s unclear if the company will close them again to help reduce strain on the AI’s systems.
Google did share some information about how Gemini compares to GPT-4V, one of the latest versions of GPT-4, and it actually achieves more accurate results in several fields based on the tech giant’s provided information. However, it’s hard to say exactly which one is better, as they both have their strengths. Ultimately, I’d recommend trying to complete whatever task you want to accomplish in both, and then seeing which one works best for your needs.
Google is also working on other AI-driven systems, which it could possibly include in Gemini’s working systems later down the line. For now, though, the company is keeping some of its more extreme developments, like MusicLM, which uses AI to generate music, to itself.
Josh Hawkins has been writing about science, gaming, and tech culture for over a decade. He’s a top-rated reviewer with extensive experience helping people find the best deals on tech and more.
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