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Exciting Updates from Google: Meet Gemini 1.5 Flash, Enhanced Gemini 1.5 Pro, and their future plans with Project Astra!

Picture for Alastair Miller Alastair Miller

May 22nd 2024

Last week Google unveiled some mind-blowing updates to its AI offerings which I can’t wait to explore! These updates include the brand-new Gemini 1.5 Flash, impressive enhancements to Gemini 1.5 Pro, and the exciting progress on “Project Astra”, Google’s vision for the next generation of AI assistants.

Introducing Gemini 1.5 Flash: Speed and Efficiency at Scale

Say hello to Gemini 1.5 Flash, the latest addition to Google’s family of AI models. Designed to be faster and more efficient, 1.5 Flash is perfect for handling tasks at scale. Although it’s lighter than the 1.5 Pro, it still packs a punch with its ability to perform multimodal reasoning across vast amounts of information.

“Gemini 1.5 Flash is a powerhouse for summarisation, chat applications, image and video captioning, data extraction from long documents and tables, and more,” said Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind. “It’s been trained by 1.5 Pro through a process called ‘distillation,’ where the essential knowledge and skills from a larger model are transferred to a smaller, more efficient model.”

Enhanced Gemini 1.5 Pro: Bigger and Better

Google has also supercharged its Gemini 1.5 Pro model as it looks to keep pace with it’s rival, ChatGPT. This upgrade enhances its abilities in code generation, logical reasoning, multi-turn conversations, and understanding both audio and images.

Gemini 1.5 Pro is now integrated into several Google products, including the Gemini Advanced and Workspace apps, and with its newfound ability to understand different media inputs, it’s not just about text anymore – images are finally in the mix too!

Project Astra: The Future of AI Assistants

Finally, Google shared some fascinating progress on Project Astra and its vision for the future of AI assistants. The company is developing prototype agents to process information faster, understand context better, and respond quickly in conversations.

“We’ve always dreamt of creating a universal agent that’s useful in everyday life. Project Astra demonstrates multimodal understanding and real-time conversational capabilities,”“With this technology, it’s easy to imagine a future where everyone has an expert AI assistant by their side, accessible through a phone or even smart glasses.”

What’s Next?

Google appears to be going “all-in” on AI publicly, with more and more integrations being rolled out across their vast suite of products and services. At the moment the possibilities appear to be endless.

Are you using Gemini or any of Google’s AI tools? Let me know in the comments below.


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