Google has unveiled a new artificial intelligence model that it claims outperforms ChatGPT in most tests and displays "advanced reasoning" across multiple formats, including an ability to view and mark a student's physics homework. The model, called Gemini, is the first to be announced since last month's global AI safety summit where tech firms agreed to collaborate with governments on testing advanced systems before and after their release. Google said it was in discussions with the UK's newly formed AI Safety Institute over testing Gemini's most powerful version, which will be released next year. The model comes in three versions and is "multimodal", which means it can comprehend text, audio, images, video and computer code simultaneously. Gemini, which will be folded into Google products including its search engine, is being released initially in more than 170 countries including the US on Wednesday in the form of an upgrade to Google's chatbot Bard.

Google has launched a new AI model, dubbed Gemini, which it claims can outperform both OpenAI's GPT-4 model and "expert level" humans in a range of intelligence tests. AIs can trick each other into doing things they aren't supposed to The firm's CEO, Sundar Pichai, revealed the existence of Gemini at Google's I/O conference in May this year, although it was still in training at the time. But today the company has announced that it will be launching the cutting-edge model to the public. Three versions of Gemini have been created for different applications, called Nano, Pro and Ultra, which increase in size and capability. Google declined to answer questions on the size of Pro and Ultra, the number of parameters they include or the scale or source of their training data. But its smallest version, Nano, which is designed to run locally on smartphones, is actually two models: one for slower phones that has 1.8 billion parameters and one for more powerful devices that has 3.25 billion parameters.

Google is bringing Gemini, the new large language model it just introduced, to Android, beginning with the Pixel 8 Pro. The company's flagship smartphone will run Gemini Nano, a version of the model built specifically to run locally on smaller devices, Google announced in a blog post. The Pixel 8 Pro is powered by the Google Tensor G3 chip designed to speed up AI performance. This lets the Pixel 8 Pro add several smarts to existing features. The phone's Recorder app, for instance, has a Summarize feature that currently needs a network connection to give you a summary of recorded conversations, interviews, and presentations.

Increasing talk of artificial intelligence developing with potentially dangerous speed is hardly slowing things down. A year after OpenAI launched ChatGPT and triggered a new race to develop AI technology, Google today revealed an AI project intended to reestablish the search giant as the world leader in AI. Gemini, a new type of AI model that can work with text, images, and video, could be the most important algorithm in Google's history after PageRank, which vaulted the search engine into the public psyche and created a corporate giant. An initial version of Gemini starts to roll out today inside Google's chatbot Bard for the English language setting. It will be available in more than 170 countries and territories.

This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. For non-personal use or to order multiple copies, please contact Dow Jones Reprints at 1-800-843-0008 or visit www.djreprints.com.

Demis Hassabis has never been shy about proclaiming big leaps in artificial intelligence. Most notably, he became famous in 2016 after a bot called AlphaGo taught itself to play the complex and subtle board game Go with superhuman skill and ingenuity. Today, Hassabis says his team at Google has made a bigger step forward--for him, the company, and hopefully the wider field of AI. Gemini, the AI model announced by Google today, he says, opens up an untrodden path in AI that could lead to major new breakthroughs. "As a neuroscientist as well as a computer scientist, I've wanted for years to try and create a kind of new generation of AI models that are inspired by the way we interact and understand the world, through all our senses," Hassabis told WIRED ahead of the announcement today.

It was a strange Thanksgiving for Sam Altman. Normally, the CEO of OpenAI flies home to St. Louis to visit family. But this time the holiday came after an existential struggle for control of a company that some believe holds the fate of humanity in its hands. He went to his Napa Valley ranch for a hike, then returned to San Francisco to spend a few hours with one of the board members who had just fired and reinstated him in the span of five frantic days. He put his computer away for a few hours to cook vegetarian pasta, play loud music, and drink wine with his fiancé Oliver Mulherin. "This was a 10-out-of-10 crazy thing to live through," Altman tells TIME on Nov. 30. We're speaking exactly one year after OpenAI released Chat-GPT, the most rapidly adopted tech product ever. The impact of the chatbot and its successor, GPT-4, was transformative--for the company and the world. "For many people," Altman says, 2023 was "the year that they started taking AI seriously." Born as a nonprofit research lab dedicated to building artificial intelligence for the benefit of humanity, OpenAI became an $80 billion rocket ship. Altman emerged as one of the most powerful and venerated executives in the world, the public face and leading prophet of a technological revolution. On Nov. 17, OpenAI's nonprofit board of directors fired Altman, without warning or even much in the way of explanation. The surreal maneuvering that followed made the corporate dramas of Succession seem staid. So did OpenAI's powerful investors; one even baselessly speculated that one of the directors who defenestrated Altman was a Chinese spy. The company's visionary chief scientist voted to oust his fellow co-founder, only to backtrack. Two interim CEOs came and went.

Copilot is made by GitHub, a firm that runs an online software development platform used by more than 100 million programmers. The tool monitors every keystroke you make, predicts what you are trying to do on the fly, and offers up a nonstop stream of code snippets you could use to do it. Gift, who had been told about Copilot by someone he knew at GitHub's parent company, Microsoft, saw its potential at once. "There's no way I could have learned Rust as quickly as I did without Copilot," he says. "I basically had a supersmart assistant next to me that could answer my questions while I tried to level up. It was pretty obvious to me that we should start using it in class."

Companies developing powerful artificial intelligence systems must have independent board members representing the "interests of society", according to an expert regarded as one of the modern godfathers of the technology. Yoshua Bengio, a co-winner of the 2018 Turing Award – referred to as the "Nobel prize of computing" – said AI firms must have oversight from members of the public, as advances in the technology accelerate rapidly. Speaking in the wake of the boardroom upheaval at the ChatGPT developer OpenAI, including the exit and return of its chief executive, Sam Altman, Bengio said a "democratic process" was needed to monitor developments in the field. "How do we make sure that these advances are happening in a way that doesn't endanger the public? How do we make sure that they're not abused for increasing one's power?" the AI pioneer told the Guardian. "To me, the answer is obvious in principle.

Elon Musk's artificial intelligence startup, xAI, is seeking to raise $1bn (£0.8bn) as the world's richest man tries to keep pace with rivals including OpenAI, Microsoft and Google in the race to dominate the field. The company has already raised $135m (£107m) from investors and is seeking a total of $1bn in equity financing, according to a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. The race to develop generative AI – products that generate convincing text, image and audio from simple prompts – has intensified as Silicon Valley's biggest companies battle for supremacy after the release of OpenAI's ChatGPT in November last year. After the sensational impact of that chatbot, Microsoft announced a deepening of its partnership with OpenAI in January backed by a $10bn investment. Musk, the chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX and the owner of the X platform formerly known as Twitter, was one of OpenAI's co-founders in 2015 but left three years later. In July, Musk launched xAI and last month the company released its first AI model, a chatbot with a "rebellious streak" called Grok.