Google Gemini is not coming this year

Google has quietly postponed the launch of Gemini—its much-awaited new AI model. The launch events were intended to be Google's biggest product debut in a decade as it tries to catch up to OpenAI.

What’s going on here?

Google is struggling to match OpenAI's capabilities in conversational AI, causing it to delay Gemini's launch to continue improvements.

What does this mean?

There wasn’t much official hype about these events happening in the first place but now they have been cancelled and postponed to January. Why? Because Google thinks it didn't reliably handle some non-English language queries.

At some point, Google has got to ship. They can’t just postpoint these launches just because they are behind OpenAI. Gotta listen to the indie maker advice: ship and improve. Their own example, Bard has improved with extensions, Youtube features, etc. over time since it launched.

At the same time, it’s understandable. The expectation that Gemini will compete with GPT-4 and provide new capabilities is holding Google back. A weak launch means hundreds of billions lost for Google’s size.

Why should I care?

The delay also points to something that’s kinda obvious now. Catching up with Gpt-4 is very hard. It’s been 9 months since its launch and all the newer models are still way behind.

All hope is not lost though, Google is going to launch in January (at least the report says they will). Let’s see what they’ve got then.