As you may have noticed, this is not a breaking news site. It could’t pass for a breaking news site in a Junior High School theater production. But … in my little word of geeking out and freaking out about mobile tech and AI, and now especially the places where they crossover, this feels like a big deal.
Perplexity - the blazing fast “AI answer engine” that is my favorite and most heavily used AI app - has added support for the beta version of what Google describes as “our best model for scaling across a wide range of tasks”. Back on December 6, Google announced its Gemini model and listed these as its three sizes, and Gemini Ultra is still not available:
We've optimized Gemini 1.0, our first version, for three different sizes:
Gemini Ultra - our largest and most capable model for highly complex tasks
Gemini Pro - our best model for scaling across a wide range of tasks
Gemini Nano - our most efficient model for on-device tasks
Gemini Nano is the size that will (at some point soon we’re told) come to the Google Pixel 8 Pro exclusively. Note that Gemini Pro is listed above Nano and appears to be more capable. If I’m understanding that correctly, this is great news for a few reasons:
While we wait for Gemini Nano to come to Pixel 8 Pro (and maybe at some point further down the road, to more Android phones) we now have its big brother to try out in Perplexity.
This means if you grab an account with Perplexity, for $20 per month, you don’t have to be a Pixel owner to try out Gemini Pro, or the other market leading AI models that Perplexity lets you work with. Those include OpenAI’s latest GPT-4 and Anthropic’s excellent Claude 2-1.
Perplexity is the fastest AI app I’ve seen - I’ve highlighted its other strong and unique features that I believe make it more useful than even OpenAI’s latest in a few recent posts:
I have only tried out Gemini Pro very quickly this evening, but in just those quick efforts it seems very fast (though I want to test it vs other models more to see how much of the speed is Perplexity vs the individual models). It also offers solid, accurate results, like these:
In related news, Perplexity now also has a lovely widget for our Android home screens:
That’s it for my breaking story. I’m starting to adjust my excitement level over this down a little so that I can sleep tonight :) This might be my one and only effort at breaking news, so I hope you enjoy it.
Thanks, Patrick! Good stuff! I didn't know about the Perplexity widget. I need to check that out for my Android phone. Thanks!