Google's Gemini, 3 years in: Is this the future we wanted?

"Google announced Gemini - known as Bard, at the time - in February of 2023. To say it's been a rocky road since then would be the understatement of the century. Google has crammed Gemini into our faces at every given opportunity in a move reminiscent of the Google+ mess, often while it was still too half-baked to be effective and all while creating endless confusion between Gemini and the Google Assistant platform it's (slowly) replacing on Android - and beyond."

"And that's to say nothing, of course, of the confidently asserted misinformation Gemini - like most every other large-language model system out there - consistently serves up. Plain and simple, these systems get facts wrong shockingly often, which is a major liability for business and an even more unthinkable issue for society."

"Google and its contemporaries behind other similar systems continue trying to convince us this technology is the end-all answer for everything and an on-demand answer engine ready to replace traditional search as our source for any and all knowledge."

Google announced Gemini (initially called Bard) in February 2023, beginning a tumultuous three-year period. The company aggressively integrated Gemini across multiple platforms in a strategy reminiscent of the failed Google+ rollout, often before the technology was sufficiently developed. A major ongoing problem is that Gemini, like other large language models, frequently generates confidently asserted misinformation and factual errors, creating significant liabilities for business applications and societal concerns. Despite these challenges, Google continues promoting Gemini as a replacement for traditional search and a universal answer engine. The aggressive integration has created confusion between Gemini and the Google Assistant platform it aims to replace on Android and beyond, making the technology feel like an irritating imposition despite some genuinely useful capabilities emerging in the Android environment.

Read at Computerworld