Gemini First Look - Google's Ultimate AI is Smarter, is it a Leader?

Gemini Ultimate is probably the biggest threat to my personal career success, so it's worth thinking about what they've done well, or opportunities they leave for competitors. (hi Aravind Srinivas ) Here are my initial impressions from today's launch:

Branding - We use ChatGPT as a brand almost despite itself. The product is so good that people recognize it more than OpenAI. Google has to change their brand because Bard was so disappointing. For product bundling, Gemini is under the Google One brand. Smart because Google overall probably has a better brand than Google AI at this point.

Pricing: $20 / month, bundled with other google services. At what point does this become anticompetitive? I don't know.?But even google can't or won't go below $20. Their two month free trial shows that they have GPU to spare and are concerned about generating demand.

UI - A mix of great and cringe. Why is there a full screen modal before I use it? I just paid $20! Gradient text with strong NUX options looks great, and I think I'm a fan of dark mode by default.

Performance - Not obviously better than GPT-4 a model that was released a year ago. I don't think we are in the realm of diminishing returns for LLM improvements, so I'm excited to see what the rest of this year brings in terms of new models.

Utility - Image generation seems useful. Gmail is cool, Gemini pro and Bard's email integrations were disappointing. Sadly Gemini in Gmail integration is still just a product tease. Somebody should disrupt email to be a human+AI team sport.?Not sure if it'll be Google themselves, us, Microsoft, or somebody else.

Why now? - Gemini pro was probably the first checkpoint on their training run, and they just finished the training run on Gemini ultimate. I wouldn't expect a new or greatly enhanced model for another 12-18 months, although features should improve in the meantime, and Google will probably include more bundling.

Global integration - They still say 40 languages, which is strange to me because even GPT4, trained a year ago supports 100. Gemini's global product team, you are better than this!?