Gemini Overload: Google's Latest Updates

(The Debrief is delivered monthly and included as part of your subscription to The Productivity Ping)

Hey friends, I’m not going to lie: Even I was pretty confused following the recent announcement by Google where:

• Gemini replaced Bard, but there’s Gemini Pro…and Gemini Ultra, but wait it’s called Gemini Advanced? And now we have Gemini Pro 1.5? Ok wtf is going on.

Let’s clear this up.

tl;dr

Making sense of all the different names

If you start a new chat with Gemini, you will see 2 options:

1. Gemini is powered by the Pro 1.0 model (as of Feb 18th, 2024)
2. Gemini Advanced is powered by the Ultra 1.0 model

Availability

Personal Google Accounts

If you live in one of these places, you can purchase the Google One AI Premium membership to access Gemini Advanced.

If you’re an Android user, you can download the Google Gemini app from the Play Store (wow the ratings are bad).

If you’re an iPhone user, you’ll be able to access Gemini directly from the Google app (it’s still being rolling out)

If you have enrolled into Google Workspace Labs, you might already be able to access Gemini in Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Meet.

If not, you will have to purchase the Google One AI Premium plan to use Gemini in Google Workspace applications in the future (e.g. the "Help me write" feature in Gmail and Google Docs).

Business users

Duet AI will soon be replaced by Gemini for Workspace, but no date has been set.

Ok so…which one is better?

I’ll be honest: Before the launch of Gemini Advanced, I primarily used ChatGPT 4-Turbo for 90% of my tasks simply because it wasn’t a fair fight (the normal Gemini is on par with ChatGPT 3.5, which is also free).

After an entire week of copy and pasting the same prompt into both Gemini Advanced and ChatGPT 4-Turbo, I am pleasantly surprised to share that I now use Gemini Advanced for 90% of my tasks due to more relevant and accurate results from Gemini.

Obviously I’m just 1 datapoint, if you try both, please let me know what you think!

Looking ahead

Google announced the Pro 1.5 model on Feb 15th, 2024 so there’s a good chance both the free and paid versions of Gemini are getting an improvement soon.

This is pure guesswork on my part but it wouldn’t make sense if only the free version gets the 1 million token benefit.

At the same time, ChatGPT-5 is rumored to launch sometime this year so who knows which chatbot we’ll be using in 3 months 🤷🏻

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