The world of AI moves fast. What wasGoogle Bard mere weeks agois nowGoogle Gemini, a reasonably intelligent language model that competes with the likes of GPT. For users seeking maximum horsepower, Google is also offering Gemini Advanced ($20/month USD after a free two-month trial). Google doesn’t go into a lot of details about what makes Advanced, well,advanced,but we took a deep dive so that you don’t have to.
When we reached out to Google, a PR rep summed it up for us in a statement, “Gemini Advanced gives you access to Ultra 1.0, our most capable, state-of-the-art AI model.” In comparison, the free version uses the Pro 1.0 model, which is slightly less capable. Read on to learn more about the differences we found, and what to expect in the next version, which is already in testing.
Why should anyone trust Gemini to stick around?
Whether it’s Now, Assistant, or Bard, how many times will we be burned by Google?
Gemini Advanced: the professional’s choice in AI?
Gemini Advanced has capabilities that might be helpful in work settings
To set the stage, Gemini Advanced is clearly targeted at professionals and others who use AI to solve complex, multipart problems. The Gemini Advancedlanding pagedescribes Advanced as “far more capable at reasoning, following instructions, coding, and creative collaboration.” Put another way: If you’re a casual AI user, Advanced probably isn’t worth the step-up from the free version — at least not yet.
On the more pedestrian side of things, Google claims only Advanced offers integration with Gmail, Docs “and more.” However, we easily pulled an email from our Google account via free Gemini, and even queried flight schedules without issue. In the future, this might be something Google only offers in Advanced as a premium feature. However, Google and Microsoft are already in direct competition to integrate AI with their respective productivity suites, which is likely to keep these features in the free zone. Finally, Google also touts 2TB of Drive storage for Advanced users, which is definitely a nice extra.
Trying out Advanced’s ‘creative collaboration’
To test out the differences here, we asked Gemini to help us generate short story ideas. The free version of Gemini launched directly into brainstorming plots. The Advanced version, on the other hand, gave some plot concepts but also broke down other considerations, such as protagonists, settings, and themes. Overall, Advanced performed with significantly more depth and thoughtfulness here.
Google promotes the more intricate reasoning available in Advanced as an incentive to upgrade from the free version. Among other things, this means that Advanced can understand complex questions with multiple considerations better than the free version. For example, we asked Advanced, “What is the probability of rolling two dice and getting a sum of 7, given that the first die shows a 4?” Advanced correctly answered:
“Since you know the first die shows a 4, there’s only one way to get a sum of 7: the second die must show a 3.
There are six equally likely outcomes for the second die, only one of which results in a sum of 7. Therefore, the probability is1/6.”
In contrast, the free version of Gemini didn’t seem to grasp the question and gave a wildly incorrect answer. However, it’s worth noting that the free version of GPT didn’t balk at the problem.
Is Gemini Advanced better at coding?
I’m not a coder myself, but theReddit communityseems generally positive about Gemini Advanced for coding use cases. User u/Ripviserion noted, “I also work with Python, JS and Java and the experience has been great so far. It could detect the issues, create snippets I need, and refactor code perfectly.” Another coder, u/Pra713, noted, “In my experience, Gemini Advanced has been better than ChatGPT, Copilot, and Gemini Basic … mainly use it for data analysis, visualization, dashboarding, and ML.”
ChatGPT vs. Gemini: Which gives the better answers?
Gemini is bringing ChatGPT some much needed competition
On the horizon: v1.5 and longer context windows
Shortly after Google publicly launched Gemini Advanced using the Ultra 1.0 model, the organization rolled out version 1.5 for developer testing. Gemini Ultra 1.5 ups the ante on power users with the longestcontext windows— a measure of how much data can be fed to an AI model for holistic processing as a single pool of information — of any AI model.
It’s easy to see how this could be incredibly useful for the analysis of lengthy and complex prose, large-scale code processing, and a lot more. No word yet on when 1.5 will get a full public release.
The bottom line: Is Gemini Advanced worth it?
In the end, whether Gemini Advanced is worth $20 a month really depends on your personal use cases and output expectations. In our (admittedly limited) testing, we did find Gemini Advanced to be more accurate and more deeply “thoughtful” than core Gemini. The best recommendation we can make here is to try the free two-month trial. If you use AI for professional work or other pursuits that go deeper than experimentation and entertainment, you may find a winner in Gemini Advanced. Just remember that, like all AI models to-date, it is imperfect, and you should always double-check its work when the outcome is important.
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