Gemini: All You Need to Know about Google’s Multimodal AI

On Dec. 6, 2023, Google unveiled Gemini, a ground-breaking multimodal AI model that can process and combine various data types — like text, code, audio, images, and video. Available in three variants (Ultra, Pro, and Nano), Gemini is tailored for a range of applications, from complex data center operations to on-device tasks, such as those on the Pixel 8 Pro and the latest smartphone from Samsung, the Galaxy S24. Its deployment across Google’s product portfolio — including Search, Duet AI, and Bard — aims to enhance user experiences with sophisticated AI functionalities, setting a new standard for multimodal AI models with its state-of-the-art performance in understanding natural images, audio, video, and mathematical reasoning.

The development of Gemini is a significant milestone in the evolution of AI, marking a shift from unimodal systems to more complex multimodal models that can handle various data inputs simultaneously. Gemini’s transformer decoder architecture and training on a diverse dataset enable it to integrate and interpret different data types effectively, showcasing Google’s commitment to AI innovation and its influence on the future of AI applications.

This article provides a thorough overview of Gemini and its capabilities.

A Closer Look at Gemini

At the core of Gemini’s architecture is a transformer-based structure, which is a type of deep learning model that has revolutionized the way machines understand human languages. This architecture enables Gemini to excel in tasks requiring complex reasoning and understanding across different modalities.

Gemini is available in three variants:

Gemini 1.0 Ultra: Largest and most capable model that excels in complex tasks. It has a transformer-based architecture that is undergoing extensive testing and refinement before a broader release. Currently in a private beta for developers, Google is conducting extensive trust and safety checks, including red-teaming by external parties, and refining the model through fine-tuning and reinforcement learning from human feedback. Consumers can experience Gemini Ultra through the latest incarnation of Bard, Gemini Advanced.

Gemini 1.0 Pro: Balanced performance and efficiency, available for developers and enterprises, supports 38 languages across 180+ countries, is accessible via the Gemini API in Google AI Studio or Google Cloud Vertex AI, free to use within limits with competitive pricing planned for the future. This is the publicly available model for developers to build chatbots or applications powered by the multimodal variant, Gemini Pro Vision.

Gemini 1.5 Pro: A next-generation AI model announced recently that outperforms its predecessor, Gemini 1.0 Pro, on 87% of the benchmarks used for developing large language models (LLMs). It can find specific information within a long block of text with an impressive 99% success rate. Gemini 1.5 Pro introduces a breakthrough experimental feature in long-context understanding, with a standard 128,000 token context window that can be extended to 1 million tokens. Additionally, Gemini 1.5 Pro demonstrates high “in-context learning” skills, allowing it to learn new information from a lengthy prompt without requiring additional fine-tuning. The model also has a context window capacity of up to 1 million tokens, enabling it to process vast amounts of information in one go — including video, audio, and large codebases. Furthermore, it can seamlessly analyze, classify, and summarize large amounts of content within a given prompt, showcasing its complex reasoning and understanding capabilities. This model is not publicly available yet for developers.

Gemini 1.0 Nano: Most efficient, optimized for on-device tasks, integrated into the Pixel 8 Pro smartphone, powers features like Summarize in the Recorder app and Smart Reply in Gboard, operates independently of internet connectivity, enhancing data privacy and security, and improving battery life. This is available in private preview for developers building mobile apps based on Android. Eventually, Gemini Nano is expected to run on edge devices with limited resources.

Gemini’s multimodal capabilities are a cornerstone of its design, allowing it to understand and generate content across text, images, audio, and video. This is made possible by its architecture, which includes discrete image tokens for image generation and integrates audio features from the Universal Speech Model for nuanced audio understanding. For video data, Gemini treats it as sequential images interweaved with text or audio inputs, showcasing its ability to handle complex multimodal inputs seamlessly.

Below is a summary of the variants of Gemini:

Though Google didn’t disclose the details of the training process, the dataset used to train Gemini is as diverse as its capabilities, encompassing web documents, books, code, images, audio, and videos. This ensures that the model can understand and process a wide variety of content, making it highly versatile in its applications. For instance, Gemini can perform image captioning, visual Q&A, code analysis, and generation, as well as text summarization, by combining different modalities to understand and generate output.

Gemini as a Capable Language Model

While Gemini is known as the best multimodal AI model, it is fundamentally a highly capable LLM. Compared to its predecessor, PaLM 2, Google has significantly expanded the capabilities of the model by incorporating advanced features that cater to a wide range of applications.

One of the standout features of Gemini 1.0 Pro is its impressive 32,000 token context window, which allows it to process and generate long-form content with a high degree of coherence and relevance. This extensive context window is a leap forward from previous models, enabling Gemini to maintain context over longer conversations or documents, thereby enhancing its ability to understand and generate nuanced and complex content.

The Gemini Embeddings model is a component of Google’s Gemini AI, designed to transform text into rich embeddings that capture the semantic nuances of the content. These embeddings are vector representations that can be used for a variety of applications, such as semantic search, content recommendation, and clustering of similar texts. The embeddings model supports an input token limit of 30,720 and an output token limit of 2,048, enabling it to handle substantial amounts of text data. With a high request rate limit of 1,500 requests per minute, the Gemini Embeddings model is optimized for performance and scalability, making it a valuable tool for developers looking to incorporate advanced natural language understanding into their applications.

Combined with Vertex AI Search and Conversation services, the Gemini LLM and embeddings model enables developers to build advanced AI assistants capable of performing Q&A, summarization, and sentiment analysis.

Gemini as a Powerful Multimodal AI Model

Gemini Pro Vision, an advanced variant of Gemini, is designed to excel in multimodal comprehension and interaction. This model is capable of processing and interpreting inputs from both textual and visual modalities, including images and videos, in order to produce coherent and contextually appropriate text responses.

Its foundation as a large language vision model enables Gemini Pro Vision to perform exceptionally well across a diverse array of tasks. These tasks range from visual understanding and classification to the summarization and creation of content based on visual inputs. The model’s capabilities are not limited to simple text and image interactions but extend to complex analyses of photographs, documents, infographics, and screenshots — showcasing its versatility and scalability across various multimodal applications.

I provided the image of Charminar along with the prompt, “Identify the monument, the city, and the most famous culinary dish” to Gemini Pro Vision, and it came back with the correct response: Charminar, Hyderabad, Biryani.

Gemini Pro Vision’s technical prowess lies in its ability to seamlessly integrate and understand multimodal prompts, enabling a wide range of use cases. Developers can harness this model to integrate sophisticated visual comprehension into their applications, unlocking functionalities such as:

Information retrieval: Seamlessly combining world knowledge with visual data for enhanced information seeking.
Object recognition: Precise and detailed identification of objects within visual content.
Digital content comprehension: Extraction of valuable insights from complex visual content, including charts and infographics.

Gemini Pro Vision can generate structured content in formats such as HTML, CSV, and JSON in response to prompts, as well as extrapolate information from images or videos to make educated guesses about unseen or subsequent content. This breadth of capabilities underscores the model’s significance in advancing the field of multimodal AI, offering developers a powerful tool for creating more intuitive and interactive applications.

How Can Developers Get Started with Gemini?

Developers can access Gemini Pro 1.0 through Google AI Studio or Google Cloud Vertex AI, with Gemini Ultra 1.0, Gemini Pro 1.5, and Gemini Nano 1.0 also available for specific use cases through private preview.

Google AI Studio provides a web-based tool for prototyping and running prompts, while Vertex AI offers a more comprehensive platform for deploying and managing AI models with additional features for safety, privacy, and compliance. If you are developing and deploying applications that run outside of the Google Cloud environment, you can generate an API key within the Google AI Studio to gain access to the models. Google AI Studio also acts as a playground for experimenting with prompts and various API parameters that impact the accuracy of the response.

Gemini Pro 1.0 is available with a large free tier, allowing developers to build generative AI apps without initial costs. The free tier includes rate limits of 60 queries per minute, with both input and output being free of charge. Pay-as-you-go pricing will be introduced soon, with competitive rates for those who exceed the free tier limits. For early access to Gemini Ultra, developers may contact their Google account representative.