Google Faked it.

Probably in breach of advertising standards, Google Faked, or at best ‘mis-represented’ the capabilities of Gemini.

The eye catching video, with the voice over. Faked. Made from a collage of prompts and still images, then polished into a video.

The ‘headline results’, mis-representation. The product released this month does not outperform chatGPT4. The released model is the smaller gemini-Pro, which is broadly chatGPT 3.5. Even when you consider the results from the benchmarks for 'Gemini-Ultra’, it very much looks like some ‘leniency’ has been applied, either by subtle prompt changes, or when using sequences of prompts, using 32 steps as opposed to 5. Also smaller context window (Gemini 32k vs chat GPT 128k), not really mentioned…

Just for perspective, the announcement raised share price on alphabet by 5%, or $56Billion Market Cap.

For me this leaves a sour taste, there are so many tools and companies trying to launch and sell product. I am not sure how this ‘fake it till you make it’, or ‘launching versions due in 4 months’ should or could be tolerated. There is a difference between ‘early releases’, and selling what used to be called ‘vapour ware’.

It’s time now to wait and see what the independent benchmarks have to say about Gemini. Let’s hope beyond this mis-step driven by the pressure to have a product launch, there is solid technology. Google needs to catch-up and step-up.

Read the following with care

Actual Released Products

In contrast some products were released that pretty much do what they say.

Microsoft released a couple of products recently, and a whole marketing push on co-pilots.

Microsoft Designer is a business friendly tool that now has a few useful features. This is clearly going to be part of the powerpoint co-pilot. It almost looks like a shot across the space between powerpoint and canvas, bringing in some of the basic tools from photoshop.

You can also choose to share your prompts as a template with suggested editable fields. Like this one.

In addition to Designer, Microsoft have updated the Free video editing software, ClipChamp, to include some new AI features, such as auto-composition.