Google has announced the availability of Gemini Pro, one of its largest artificial intelligence (AI) models, for European users, following its launch in the United States a month earlier. The Gemini Pro model serves as an upgrade to Bard, offering users a multimodal large model capable of understanding and integrating various types of information, including text, code, audio, image, and video.
With Gemini, Google aims to rival OpenAI's renowned chatbot, ChatGPT, showcasing its performance across different capability tests in reasoning, image understanding, and coding. Gemini Pro stands out as the most versatile tool in Google's lineup, while Gemini Ultra offers larger model capabilities suited for complex tasks, and Gemini Nano is optimized for on-device usage.
The launch of Gemini was initially announced by Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai in December 2023, with the model now available in 40 countries and over 230 territories. However, its arrival in the European market comes later than its US counterpart, highlighting a trend of delayed product launches by Google in the region.
This delay in product launches in Europe is not unique to Gemini, as evidenced by the delayed rollout of Google Pay in 2020 and the launch of chatbot Bard in July 2023, four months after its availability in the US and UK. Regulatory concerns, particularly regarding data privacy regulations like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), have contributed to these delays.
The European Union's strong data privacy regulations and ongoing discussions regarding the future AI Act underscore the importance of compliance and user protection in the region's AI landscape. Companies like Anthropic and HuggingFace, alongside Google and OpenAI, are competing in this burgeoning AI market, each offering unique features and capabilities tailored to different user needs.
In this fiercely competitive landscape, AI chatbots like Bard and ChatGPT are striving to establish dominance, offering users innovative solutions while navigating regulatory challenges and meeting evolving user expectations.
