Why Are People Bashing Google Gemini if It’s Better Than GPT-4?

Let’s not mix science with marketing

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Whether you think Google DeepMind’s Gemini is a success or not depends mainly on whether you like Google or not.

Google announced Gemini on Wednesday by surprise. It was thought to be released in Q1 2024 but they moved the event up. The reported performance is great — Gemini surpasses GPT-4 on most benchmarks — the demo grabbed people’s attention, and researchers who worked on the project seemed happy with the results.

But soon enough people found flaws and shortcomings in both the model and the presentation. From bashing Google they jumped to bash Gemini. Their rightful skepticism of Google’s ability to make worthwhile AI (which ironically contrasts with the fact that it invented the transformer) and a long history of overpromising and underdelivering that has favored OpenAI for years, are a heavy burden on Google’s back. It seems Gemini is not going to be enough to lift it fully despite the breakthrough it represents.