Google recently relaunched and renamed its generative AI chatbot in December 2023, calling it Gemini (since it was formerly known as Bard). It’s only natural for users to try to understand Gemini by comparing it with ChatGPT, which is the leading AI chatbot in the world. While ChatGPT is estimated to have 180 million active users currently, having generated 1.6 billion visits in January 2024, Google’s Gemini is said to have around 330 million monthly visitors, according to some sources. So, let’s explore what’s new with Google’s new AI chatbot evolution and how it compares with OpenAI’s revolutionary chatbot, ChatGPT.
Google’s Gemini vs ChatGPT: What are the big differences?
Google’s Gemini and ChatGPT are both popular generative AI chatbots that implement Artificial Intelligence (AI) to answer questions by generating informative, creative, and conversational content. As Large Language Models (LLMs) that are being continuously improved, GenAI chatbots are used to generate content like blog posts (not including the one that you’re reading), social posts, coding solutions, new ideas, and much more.
In the ongoing war of generative AI, Google has more than 4 billion active users worldwide, which it can introduce to its Gemini AI model (formerly known as Bard). In addition, Google has been a leader in AI research for over a decade, ever since it acquired a company called DeepMind (an AI research laboratory) in 2014. Thus, Google should most likely emerge as the dominant player in the AI race. So, why does ChatGPT still seem like an insurmountable market leader? Read on to find out!
Google’s AI evolution from Bard to Gemini vs ChatGPT: A market comparison
ChatGPT is credited for revolutionizing and accelerating the use of generative AI across industries and in everyday lives all across the globe. When it launched in 2022, ChatGPT set the record for being the fastest-growing application in world history (now second to Threads), having acquired 1 million users only 5 days after launch and 100 million active users only two months after launch. According to Similarweb, ChatGPT recently crossed over 1.6 billion visitors.
In our blog, ChatGPT vs. Bard (that we wrote just last year), we elaborated on how ChatGPT threatened Google’s Search Market (its largest revenue generator) and how Google’s Bard was a response to that. Speaking of Bard, which launched in March 2023, it showed great promise with its ability to draw information directly from the internet to inform its responses. However, it turned out that Bard’s capabilities were just a Bard’s tale, and it was even farther from being market-ready than predicted. As a result, it ended up costing Google’s parent company, Alphabet, a loss of $100 billion in market value when it made some serious factual errors in its promotional material.
While that gives a rough overview of Gemini’s rapid evolution in the AI market, let’s now explore how Gemini and ChatGPT compare and compete feature-wise.
What is Google’s Gemini, and how does it work?
Developed by Google DeepMind, Google’s Gemini is actually a family of AI models, consisting of Gemini Pro, Gemini Nano, and Gemini Ultra. A specially trained version of Gemini Pro has replaced Bard as Google’s new generative chatbot, excelling in handling more complex queries and creative text generation, including mathematical reasoning and coding skills. Most importantly, Gemini can also naturally understand, interpret, and respond to images, audio, and videos due to native multimodality (but more on that later).
On a side note, Gemini Nano is a lightweight version designed to work on mobile devices to generate smart responses and summarization (even without the internet). Gemini Ultra is the largest model designed for highly complex tasks like tackling massive datasets, performing in-depth code analysis, or generating highly nuanced creative text formats.
Unlike some LLMs, the Gemini Pro-powered chatbot (that has replaced Bard) boasts access to real-time information through Google Search, which allows answers based on the latest available knowledge. Gemini can also directly quote at length from webpages and share citations. For answers with URLs or image thumbnails, Gemini enables users to easily navigate directly to the source in some cases.
Google also provides Gemini Advanced as part of their Google One AI premium plan, which gives access to Google’s most capable AI model, 1.0 Ultra. With 1.0 Ultra, Gemini is far more capable of performing highly complex tasks like coding, logical reasoning, following nuanced instructions, and creative collaboration.
What is ChatGPT, and why is it leading the GenAI chatbot race?
ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, is the leading generative AI chatbot that runs on an advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) model. It stands out for its ability to engage in human-like conversations and generate contextually relevant text to a vast variety of prompts.
Most GenAI chatbot users currently favor it because of its ability to create unique and creative content. It’s nearly (if not already) become second nature for users across the world to turn to ChatGPT, professionally and personally, to generate emails, poetry, text summarization, educational material, coding solutions, and much more.
Unlike traditional chatbots, ChatGPT doesn't rely on pre-programmed responses but instead generates responses based on patterns learned from the input data. This versatility makes it particularly unique, especially for business applications such as customer service, content creation, and language translation. For this reason, most businesses are leveraging OpenAI connectors to automate business processes with GenAI.
What are ChatGPT's drawbacks compared to GenAI models like Gemini?
While ChatGPT has undoubtedly spearheaded the AI revolution, one if its crucial drawback is its knowledge cut-off date (currently Jan '22). In other words, while ChatGPT is trained on a massive data set of text (large collection of books, articles, and web pages) and code, this data is limited to its last training period. This lets Google's Gemini stand out from ChatGPT with access to Google Search and real-time data and, when it comes to generating the latest and more factually accurate text.
Another key feature that ChatGPT has recently incorporated is being multimodal, which allows users to interact with it through image prompts, voice commands, and AI-generated voice responses. Additionally, ChatGPT Plus (which is the subscription-based version) has added Dall-E to its repertoire for powerful AI image generation. However, it is important to understand that this multimodality is limited within the GenAI chatbot to text-based responses, as ChatGPT isn’t inherently multimodal. This brings us to the key difference between ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini.
What is the big difference between Google’s Gemini vs ChatGPT?
Being natively multimodal is currently Gemini's biggest advantage over ChatGPT. This means that it is built to process text, sound, visual, coding, and gesture-based prompts natively, and it can naturally generate these forms of content. On the other hand, while ChatGPT is now multimodal, it is natively built to generate text-based responses). A simple experiment to understand this is if you ask Gemini to show you the most popular ads in the world, it will share actual visuals of the ads along with descriptions, whereas ChatGPT will give you a response that describes the same in text format.
Another example to explain the significance of this native multimodality is if you ask Google’s Gemini to tell you - “what is the most popular music video in the world, and can you play it for me?” - it actually draws up the most popular YouTube video in the world:
But, if you throw it a curveball, it seems to crack under the pressure, and it resorts to plausible deniability, even going so far as to deny and contradict the capabilities it displays:
Apart from this issue, and the big image-generation controversy, the long story short is that when it comes to the GenAI wars, it’s safe to say that Google’s Gemini shouldn’t be written off as a “Baby Shark”. Speaking of the video that it shared, it is interesting to see how Gemini pulled up a video from another Google Product, YouTube.
That specific observation brings us to our final conclusion and capability comparison of Gemini vs ChatGPT, i.e., what integration advantages do Google’s Gemini and ChatGPT offer?
Gemini vs ChatGPT: What are the integration benefits?
Both ChatGPT and Gemini are powerful large language models, offering particularly effective GenAI chatbots. While ChatGPT still takes the cake for generating unique, conversational, and creative content, Google’s Gemini now shines in generating more real-time content for research-related queries and multimodal suggestions. As such, it can become an excellent extension to Google Search - in time. However, where both the OpenAI model and Google Gemini model can really compete to stay relevant in business industries is based on their integration capabilities.
Currently, Microsoft Bing boasts its integration with an OpenAI LLM that’s more powerful than ChatGPT, which powers its search and enables it to be more competitive with Google Search. On the other hand, Google has doubled down with Gemini by offering seamless integrations of the AI model with the Google ecosystem. This includes tight integration with other Google Workspace products like Docs, Sheets, Slides, Calendar, and Gmail, making it a powerhouse for tasks like research, content creation within Docs and Slides, smart replies within Gmail, and efficient scheduling with the Calendar. Yet, while businesses are already integrating OpenAI with all kinds of applications and processes, like e-commerce, CRM, marketing, and social media, Google’s Gemini still has to break ground in integrations with external applications.
Ultimately, the ideal GenAI chatbot that is free to use depends on priorities. This includes factors like the nature of tasks, the importance of real-time information access, and the level of creative text generation required. Both ChatGPT and Gemini are constantly evolving, and it can be safely said that the war for the best AI tool for individuals and businesses across the world is far from over.
Saad has a decade's worth of experience in writing all kinds of content for digital marketing mediums. At Alumio, he became fascinated with the idea of application integrations. He now enjoys "integrating" all his marketing experience to explain how Alumio works in a way that's fun, inventive, and easy to understand. On a personal level, he's busy attempting to integrate his passion for philosophy, anime, gaming, fiction, cinema, food, and the art of good conversation.
