Google DeepMind’s Response to ChatGPT Could Be the Most Important AI Breakthrough Ever

ChatGPT popularized AI but Gemini is posited to be a much bigger milestone

ChatGPT is not AI’s first triumph but it is the most remarkable one. By far.

More a product and design feat than a technical one, ChatGPT has become a historical landmark in AI’s seven-decade run. A social and political phenomenon without precedent. In the last six months, OpenAI has become the most watched-after startup in tech, the juiciest investment in AI, and the first real threat to Google in its 25-year life. The young startup has rightfully earned every bit of the cascade of praise and recognition it has received.

Somewhere else in Silicon Valley, the light has been dimmer. Long faces, silent frustration, alarms going off—Google had lost the spotlight. The company's researchers and engineers knew (as OpenAI did) that the reward should have been theirs. They had everything they needed (in higher amounts than OpenAI) to have successfully launched their own ChatGPT first.

Google had been openly releasing key research for years in the name of science and OpenAI capitalized on it. They took the opportunity and made a product people wanted to use. They forged a strong partnership with one of Google's main competitors, Microsoft, and successfully attracted great talent from Google Brain and DeepMind, Google’s Londoner AI subsidiary, with the appeal of freshness and boldness.

Google bled. They bled and waited. But they had enough.

To combat the OpenAI-Microsoft alliance, Google Brain and DeepMind—known to have internal conflicts—decided to merge into Google DeepMind, a single entity that takes the best from each into what’s arguably the finest pool of AI talent in the world.

And to combat the ChatGPT sensation they began a secret project, Gemini, posited to displace the ChatGPT + GPT-4 tandem as the most powerful AI model. As we'll see soon, Gemini embodies a great promise: The convergence of the two most extraordinary success stories in 70 years of AI progress—the GPT family and the Alpha family—into one system.

I explore below Google DeepMind's plans to make Gemini the most important AI breakthrough ever and how the secret sauces of these two families of AI models will help them do it.