Welcome to The Week in Generative AI, a weekly column for marketers from Quad Insights that quickly sums up need-to-know developments surrounding this rapidly evolving technology.

Google launches Gemini AI

On Wednesday, Google unveiled Gemini, its latest AI language model. David Pierce writes in The Verge “Google is launching the model in a few ways right now,” The Verge’s David Pierce reports. “Bard is now powered by Gemini Pro, and Pixel 8 Pro users will get a few new features thanks to Gemini Nano.” Gemini Ultra is scheduled for release next year and “seems to be mostly designed for data centers and enterprise applications,” says Pierce.

Bloomberg’s Davey Alba and Shirin Ghaffary report that Eli Collins, Vice President of Product at Google DeepMind, claims Gemini “outpaced GPT-4 … in seven out of eight benchmarks it tested for on general language understanding, reasoning, math and coding” and that testing also included “real toxicity prompts … developed by the Allen Institute for AI that contains more than 100,000 prompts pulled from the web” to mitigate hate speech and political bias.

Wired’s Will Knight writes that “Google’s release of Gemini … suggests that a new AI winter isn’t coming anytime soon,” while The Atlantic’s Matteo Wong observes that “Gemini’s launch provides the clearest sign yet that generative AI has reached its corporate phase,” as the announcement “feels like any other Silicon Valley product launch.” Wong places this update as one of many in a crowded and increasingly competitive market where new features are “iterative advances — less like the invention of a smartphone and more like adding a few megapixels to its camera.”

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IBM and Meta create AI Alliance

Meta Platforms and IBM have launched the AI Alliance, an initiative with over 50 members, including AMD, Oracle, Yale University and the National Science Foundation. This group is promoting an “open model” of AI, countering the current trend of closed, proprietary systems led by firms like OpenAI and Anthropic, according to The Wall Street Journal’s Belle Lin.

IBM is introducing a new AI platform, Watsonx, while Meta recently launched its open-source Llama 2 model. Lin notes that “many of the alliance’s members are companies that have their own AI products but are struggling to catch up with the rush of attention that OpenAI and its investment partner, Microsoft, are drawing.” Meanwhile, AMD is supporting this open AI ecosystem with its hardware in an effort to challenge Nvidia’s AI chip dominance. In fact, on Wednesday, Meta and Microsoft announced plans to buy AMD chips to advance their respective AI development, CNBC’s Kif Leswing reports.

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AI for Christmas

This holiday season, the creative world is leveraging AI to personalize campaigns, deliver messages and provide a customized customer experience. Fast Company’s Chris Morris notes that this year there are “Santa chatbots, AI gift-guide aids and, in a particularly galling move, an AI-generated Jimmy Stewart to tell you a bedtime story.” OpenAI even launched a SantaGPT chatbot for Plus users. Morris cites the Salesforce Shopping Index that revealed “10% of the shoppers it surveyed plan to use generative AI to help them find gifts for friends and loved ones.”

Over at Emerging Tech Brew, Patrick Kulp covers a recent American Express report that found “a quarter of small businesses surveyed planned to use AI to expedite tasks like social media posts, marketing campaigns, seasonal hiring, and customer emails amid the year-end shopping rush.”

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Further reading

Thanks for reading.

If you’d like to catch up on prior installments of this column, start by heading to our last recap: “The Week in Generative AI: December 1, 2023”

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