In its efforts to keep up with competitors like Anthropic and OpenAI in the realm of generative AI, Google is introducing a series of updates to the no-fee tier of Gemini, its AI-powered chatbot. These updates are designed to improve both performance and availability of the platform.
Starting Thursday, Gemini 1.5 Flash, a lightweight multimodal model unveiled by Google in May, will be accessible on both web and mobile platforms in 40 languages and across approximately 230 countries. Google claims that these updates will bring enhancements in quality, as well as reduced latency, especially in reasoning and image understanding capabilities.
Google also anticipates potential cost savings on the backend, as Gemini 1.5 Flash is a streamlined and highly efficient version of Gemini 1.5 Pro, optimized for high-frequency generative AI tasks. With the overhead involved in running a chatbot platform like Gemini, Google is eager to leverage cost-cutting opportunities while also improving overall performance.
Furthermore, Google is expanding Gemini’s context window to 32,000 tokens, allowing for more extensive text analysis. This expanded context window will enable better summarization and reasoning over longer text snippets, reducing the chances of forgetting topics previously discussed in a chatbot interaction.
Users will now also be able to upload files for analysis on Gemini without the need for the paid Gemini Advanced edition. Google plans to enable file uploads from Google Drive and local devices for all Gemini users in the near future.
In an attempt to prevent hallucinations, where the AI model generates inaccurate information, Google is testing a feature that provides links to related web content under certain responses generated by Gemini. English-language users will see a “chip” icon at the end of a generated paragraph, linking to relevant websites where users can delve deeper into the information provided.
Google is gradually expanding Gemini’s reach, introducing the chatbot feature in more regions, languages, and platforms. The company is also rolling out a tailored Gemini experience for teenagers globally, with additional safeguards in place to protect young users. These measures include a new onboarding process and an AI literacy guide to encourage responsible use of AI tools.
As Google continues to enhance and refine Gemini, the goal is to provide a more reliable and efficient chatbot experience for users around the world.
