Gemini (formerly known as Bard) is a family of multimodal large language models developed by Google DeepMind, serving as the successor to LaMDA and PaLM 2.

It was positioned as a more powerful successor to PaLM 2, which was also unveiled at the event, with Google CEO Sundar Pichai stating that Gemini was still in its early developmental stages.

[4] In an interview with Wired, DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis touted Gemini's advanced capabilities, which he believed would allow the algorithm to trump OpenAI's ChatGPT, which runs on GPT-4 and whose growing popularity had been aggressively challenged by Google with LaMDA and Bard.

[5] In August 2023, The Information published a report outlining Google's roadmap for Gemini, revealing that the company was targeting a launch date of late 2023.

[9] Because Gemini was being trained on transcripts of YouTube videos, lawyers were brought in to filter out any potentially copyrighted materials.

[14][16] Touted as Google's "largest and most capable AI model" and designed to emulate human behavior,[17][14][18] the company stated that Gemini would not be made widely available until the following year due to the need for "extensive safety testing".

Similarly, the company was engaged in discussions with the government of the United Kingdom to comply with the principles laid out at the AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park in November.

[30] In February, 2024, Google launched "Gemini 1.5" in a limited capacity, positioned as a more powerful and capable model than 1.0 Ultra.

[34] The same month, Google debuted Gemma, a family of free and open-source LLMs that serve as a lightweight version of Gemini.

Gemini's dataset is multimodal and multilingual, consisting of "web documents, books, and code, and includ[ing] image, audio, and video data".

[47] As of 2024 August, the models released include[48] Gemini's launch was preluded by months of intense speculation and anticipation, which MIT Technology Review described as "peak AI hype".

[50][20] In August 2023, Dylan Patel and Daniel Nishball of research firm SemiAnalysis penned a blog post declaring that the release of Gemini would "eat the world" and outclass GPT-4, prompting OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to ridicule the duo on X (formerly Twitter).

"[54] Reacting to its unveiling in December 2023, University of Washington professor emeritus Oren Etzioni predicted a "tit-for-tat arms race" between Google and OpenAI.

Professor Chirag Shah of the University of Washington was less impressed, likening Gemini's launch to the routineness of Apple's annual introduction of a new iPhone.

[50][55] Writing for Fast Company, Mark Sullivan opined that Google had the opportunity to challenge the iPhone's dominant market share, believing that Apple was unlikely to have the capacity to develop functionality similar to Gemini with its Siri virtual assistant.