Google DeepMind’s new Gemini model looks amazing -- but could signal peak AI hype -- Melissa Heikkilä and Will Douglas Heaven, MIT

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It outmatches GPT-4 in almost all ways—but only by a little. Was the buzz worth it?

Melissa Heikkilä andWill Douglas Heaven -- MIT Technology Review

Dec. 6, 2023

Hype about Gemini, Google DeepMind’s long-rumored response to OpenAI’s GPT-4, has been building for months.

Today the company finally revealed what it has been working on in secret all this time. Was the hype justified? Yes -- and no. 

Gemini is Google’s biggest AI launch yet -- its push to take on competitors OpenAI and Microsoft in the race for AI supremacy. There is no doubt that the model is best-in-class across a wide range of capabilities -- an “everything machine,” as one observer puts it. 

“The model is innately more capable,” Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google and its parent company Alphabet, told MIT Technology Review. “It’s a platform. AI is a profound platform shift, bigger than web or mobile. And so it represents a big step for us.” 

It’s a big step for Google, but not necessarily a giant leap forward for the field as a whole. Google DeepMind claims that Gemini outmatches GPT-4 on 30 out of 32 standard measures of performance. And yet the margins between them are thin.

What DeepMind has done is pull AI’s best current capabilities into one powerful package. To judge from demos, it does many things very well -- but few things that we haven’t seen before. For all the furor about the next big thing, Gemini could be a sign that we’ve reached peak AI hype. At least for now.

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READ MORE: MIT Technology Review