Sources: Google quietly delayed Gemini's public launch from next week to January 2024; a source says the LLM doesn't reliably handle some non-English queries
Google has quietly delayed the public debut of Gemini, a conversational artificial intelligence that aims to compete with OpenAI …
The InformationJon Victor
Context & Ripple Effects
Google had moved from limited early access for a small group of companies to a less certain rollout timetable: the company had already warned some cloud customers to expect access in Q1 2024. This delay makes the gap between private testing and a broadly available product more consequential.
The reported language failures matter because Gemini was positioned as a rival to OpenAI's leading model; a public launch would expose reliability issues across a wider, multilingual user base.
First-order effects
Google postpones Gemini's public availability to January 2024, extending the period in which prospective users and customers cannot evaluate the model broadly.
The reported weakness on some non-English queries makes multilingual reliability an immediate release-quality gate for Gemini.
Second-order effects
Cloud customers whose access was already expected in Q1 face a more compressed or uncertain transition from the earlier small-company preview to usable product access.
A delayed public debut gives competing conversational-AI products more time to build user and developer adoption while Google works on release readiness.
Third-order effects
If frontier-model launches increasingly hinge on performance consistency across languages, release schedules will be shaped as much by evaluation and deployment safeguards as by headline model capability.
The episode points to a more staged model-access market, where private trials and enterprise timelines can diverge from public-launch messaging.
The trend: Frontier AI releases are becoming gated rollouts in which reliability across real-world use cases determines when model capability can be commercialized.
I'd like to imagine there's fight inside Googleplex by a mom and a kid going hellbent on stopping Gemini from going online while the AI is actively chasing them down
@Techmeme — asked Bing AI to do something ... added “por favor” at the end of my request ... only to be told that it would not handle a task in a different language than the original question 🙄
Interesting! Apparently, Google's Gemini is as good as GPT-4 in “some respects.” However, they are holding back so they can improve in other languages!! 🤯🤯 What even!! They are so far behind ChatGPT right now that they should be shipping ASAP 🚢 Ship quickly and early, and... [ima…
ChatGPT is global. We all knows how google rollout product. It'll probably be in soft rollout for 6 months and then US only for 3 years and then killed. It's doomed on arrival. They probably know how to do AI but they forgot how to do product.
Is Google... lagging behind? Or is it just that the pressure for “safety” of AI models is becoming so strong that it slows down the rollout of new models?
It's probably for the best. Gemini is likely going to be leagues behind OpenAI. It continues to amaze me just how much Google dropped the ball on AI. https://www.theinformation.com/ ...
But I appreciate googles dedication to other languages. The bias towards English in OpenAI's models, both regarding performance as well as costs, is a big problem. I am looking very much forward to Gemini!
New: Google quietly scrapped a set of Gemini launch events planned for next week, delaying the model's release to early next year. https://www.theinformation.com/ ... w/ @amir