Google showcases new AI model upgrade Gemini 1.5; CEO Sundar Pichai predicts profit

Google showcased Gemini 1.5, an upgrade to its suite of AI models it announced two months ago.

Reading "War and Peace," Leo Tolstoy's monumental novel that runs half a million words long and often over 1,000 pages, might be a minute-long affair for a new artificial intelligence model from Google.

The Alphabet-owned company on Thursday showcased Gemini 1.5, an upgrade to its suite of AI models it announced two months ago. In a single prompt, a user can ask Google's AI to analyse vastly more content than before - 30,000 lines of code, 11 hours of audio, a whole hour of video, Google said.

That's for Pro, the family's mid-sized model. In concrete terms, Pro can process 1 million pieces of data known as tokens -- five times the amount that Anthropic, perhaps the closet competitor in this regard, handles in a query of its Claude 2.1 technology.

Reuters was unable to independently test the claims.

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Google's increasingly voracious AI, on the heels of releases by ChatGPT's creator OpenAI and others, reflects the rapid arms race underway in Silicon Valley to build the most capable - and marketable - technology yet.

In an interview with Reuters, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai heralded the advance as one of multiple "breakthroughs" that would fuel his company's myriad businesses. At root, he said, the search-industry mainstay was making a new manner of inquiry possible.