On December 6, 2023, Google finally unveiled Gemini—their answer to GPT-4. After a year of playing catch-up, Google claimed they'd built something better.

The demo video was impressive. The benchmarks looked strong. But would Gemini actually deliver?

What Gemini Was

Google released three versions:

Gemini Nano: Lightweight, runs on-device (Pixel phones) Gemini Pro: Balanced performance, available in Bard Gemini Ultra: Most capable, claiming to beat GPT-4

All were multimodal from the ground up—text, images, audio, video processed natively.

The Benchmark Claims

Google's announcement highlighted Gemini Ultra's performance:

Exceeded GPT-4 on 30 of 32 academic benchmarks 90.0% on MMLU (massive multitask language understanding) First AI to beat human experts on MMLU

The numbers looked impressive. But there was a catch: Gemini Ultra wasn't actually available yet.

The Multimodal Advantage

Gemini's key differentiator: true native multimodality.

GPT-4 bolted vision onto a text model. Gemini was trained on multiple modalities simultaneously from the start.

What this meant:

• Better understanding of images in context
• Video processing capabilities
• Audio understanding
• Cross-modal reasoning

The architecture was fundamentally different from competitors.

The Demo Controversy

Google's launch video showed Gemini responding impressively to voice, video, and visual prompts in real-time.

Turns out, it was misleading. The demo was edited, slowed down, and cherry-picked. The actual Gemini experience was text-based and much slower.

The backlash was immediate. Google had overpromised and faced credibility damage.

Availability Reality

Gemini Pro: Available immediately in Bard Gemini Ultra: Coming "early 2024" Gemini Nano: Pixel phones only

Google was announcing technology that wasn't fully ready. Again.

Where Are They Now?

Gemini Ultra eventually launched as "Gemini Advanced" in February 2024. Gemini 1.5 Pro (March 2024) brought a million-token context window, legitimately impressive.

Gemini 2.0 (December 2024) is now Google's flagship, genuinely competitive with frontier models.

December 6, 2023 was Google's declaration they were back in the AI race. The execution was messy, but the technology was real—it just took time to deliver on the promises.