A British AI research lab DeepMind laboratory which is acquired by Google in 2014 working on very powerful intelligent algorithms will seemingly put ChatGPT on shame. Now, the British researcher is teasing yet another evolutionary step in the AI business. Demis Hassabis, CEO and co-founder DeepMind says Gemini’s capabilities will go beyond what OpenAI is currently offering to companies and users thanks to its experience with the board game Go.
Gemini is still in development, and it will likely take some months to complete. The project, which could cost tens or even hundreds or millions of dollars, will use advanced AI techniques developed for AlphaGo such as reinforcement learning and tree search.
Gemini will inherit its supposedly superior capabilities from AlphaGo, the artificial intelligence that achieved a historical win against a champion (human) Go player in 2016. Gemini will behave like a ChatGPT-style large language model (LLM), but it will also have advanced abilities such as planning or problem solving thanks to the previously developed AlphaGo algorithm.
Hassabis says Gemini can be considered as a combination of some of the strengths of AlphaGo-type systems with the “amazing language capabilities” of LLM-based chatbots. Users (and likely customers) will be able to provide a textual prompt, and the AI will answer – while learning the best strategies to fully satisfy users’ needs.
Reinforcement learning refers to the ability of software to learn how to tackle strategic problems, like choosing the next move in a Go match or playing a video game. Tree search is a method to explore and remember the next possible moves on a board.
Current LLM systems are limited in their ability to learn new things or even to “adapt” to strategic and complex problems as they solely rely on pattern search techniques to try and predict the most statistically significant snippets of text to answer a user’s prompt. There’s absolutely nothing “intelligent” in there, though the results of those limited generative AIs can be impressive if you don’t need accountability, reliability or just factual accuracy.
Hassabis states that “80 or 90 percent of the innovations” we are now seeming in ChatGPT and other AI systems come from DeepMind and Brain, Google’s AI research units which have now been combined in the Google DeepMind division. With Gemini, Mountain View could once again regain its supremacy in the AI race.