Google Gemini vs. Bard

Key takeaways:

• Google Bard, powered by LaMDA, focused on factual information and engaging dialogues.

• LaMDA was trained on text, code, and conversation-specific datasets for meaningful responses.

• Google launched Gemini as an upgraded multimodal AI service, replacing Bard’s LaMDA model.

• Gemini supports text, video, images, and audio, enhancing general-purpose and creative tasks.

• The Gemini service has different model variants: Nano, Pro, and Ultra, with varying capabilities.

• Gemini Pro is currently the only available model to the public, designed to balance performance.

• Bard’s interface has been rebranded as Gemini, but user experience and functionality remain seamless.

• Gemini will introduce model-switching options in the future for enhanced flexibility.

• While Gemini offers improved multimodal capabilities, some features and APIs are still developing.

After the launch of ChatGPT, Google launched its chatbot called Bard during the subsequent boom of AI and  LLMs . Bard ran on a separate model from ChatGPT on the LaMDALanguage Model for Dialogue Applications model. While Bard quickly became prominent and saw much use, particularly due to being able to draw information from more recent sources, ChatGPT was still the more popular model and more widely utilized for general-purpose tasks. Toward the end of the year, Google then announced its newest AI model, Gemini.

Bard

Google Bard featured the LaMDA model, which was trained on a massive dataset of text and code to understand and respond to human conversation in an informative way. While Bard shared some similarities with other large language models like GPT-3, which excelled at creative text generation, its focus was on providing factual information and engaging in meaningful dialogues.

LaMDA was trained on a vast dataset that includes dialogue-specific dataA dataset based on conversations between two entities., textual data, and code from various sources, such as websites, books, forums, and conversations. The model is optimized to maintain context, flow, and meaningful dialogue, providing users with fact-based responses and engaging human-like conversations.

Google Gemini

Google Gemini is a multimodal AI service that is made to accomplish tasks across different domains of generative AI. It works with text, video, images, and audio, and also bolsters enhanced execution of more complex general-purpose instructions. But what does the launch of Gemini mean for Bard users?

Google has significantly enhanced the training data for Gemini, expanding beyond textual data to incorporate multimodal datasetsDatasets that contain different modes of data, such as, textual, audio, and, visual.. This includes:

Larger datasets from web crawling, including books, scientific research papers, technical documents, code repositories, and multimedia content from various platforms.

In short, it’s simply an upgrade to their usage of Bard. While the interface has changed to reflect Bard’s new identity as Gemini, it does not lose functionality in any way. Gemini is only replacing the LaMDA model that powered Bard. To avoid confusion, the name of the service itself has also been shifted to Gemini. Similar to how ChatGPT is only a front-end for using the GPT-3, GPT-3.5, and GPT-4 models, Gemini will be a service for utilizing the Gemini Nano, Gemini Pro, and Gemini Ultra models provided by Google.

How can we use Google Gemini?

Gemini can be accessed the same way Bard was accessed. Existing links pointing to Bard will now redirect to Gemini, so users who were already using Gemini can continue to use the service as they were, and searching for Bard on Google will bring up the new linksgemini.google.com to Gemini by default. Currently, only Gemini Pro is available to the general public. This balanced model aims to compete with GPT-3.5, and is free for all users of Gemini. Bard featured no options for switching models, but Gemini will feature an option to switch between models in the future.

Quiz

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Conclusion

The table below shows a comprehensive comparison of the two models and lists the pros and cons associated with each model's different aspects.

Gemini is the replacement for Google Bard. Currently, some functionalities are limited, such as multimodal capabilities, and the other models are as of yet unreleased. Access to Gemini Pro’s API is also not available, as Google has yet to announce a timeline or further plans regarding API access for developers and researchers. However, it is still very much a direct upgrade to Bard that is just as easy to use, and no complications have been introduced for users, both old and new.