What is Gemini 1.5? All you need to know

After Gemini Ultra 1.0, Google recently introduced the next-generation Gemini 1.5 model. This latest Gemini version uses a new Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) approach to improve efficiency. It routes your request to a group of smaller “expert” neural networks, so responses are faster and of higher quality.

The new mid-sized multimodal model is optimized for scaling across a wide range of tasks. It is built with an experimental 1 million token context window, and will be available to try out in Google AI Studio. This article will help you learn about the efficient architecture, features, advantages, and other capabilities of Gemini 1.5.

What is Gemini 1.5?

Gemini 1.5 is a next-generation model. It’s a mid-size multimodal model, optimized for scaling across a wide range of tasks, and performs at a similar level to 1.0 Ultra. It also introduces a breakthrough experimental feature in long-context understanding. This latest platform distinguishes itself by enabling faster and more efficient training, coupled with the ability to process substantial amounts of information in response to user prompts. 

Google claims that Gemini 1.5 Pro can handle up to an hour’s worth of video, 11 hours of audio, or over 700,000 words in a document, a feat described as the “longest context window” among large-scale AI models. This surpasses the data processing capabilities of the latest AI models from OpenAI and Anthropic, according to Google.

Key features of Gemini 1.5 are:

High-Efficiency Architecture

Gemini 1.5 is built upon our leading research on Transformer and MoE architecture.  This specialization massively enhances the model’s efficiency. It helps Gemini 1.5 to learn complex tasks more quickly and maintain quality, while being more efficient to train and serve.

Greater context, more helpful capabilities

An AI model’s “context window” is made up of tokens, which are the building blocks used for processing information. The capacity for 1.5 Pro’s context window is beyond the original 32,000 tokens for Gemini 1.0. With increased tokens, Gemini 1.5 Pro can process vast amounts of information in one go  including 1 hour of video, 11 hours of audio, and codebases with over 30,000 lines of code or over 700,000 words.

Complex reasoning about vast amounts of information

1.5 Pro can seamlessly analyze, classify, and summarize large amounts of content within a given prompt. It maintains high levels of performance even as its context window increases. In the Needle In A Haystack (NIAH) evaluation, where a small piece of text containing a particular fact or statement is purposely placed within a long block of text, 1.5 Pro found the embedded text 99% of the time, in blocks of data as long as 1 million tokens.

Better understanding and reasoning across modalities

1.5 Pro can perform highly-sophisticated understanding and reasoning tasks for different modalities, including video. When tested on a comprehensive panel of text, code, image, audio and video evaluations, 1.5 Pro outperforms 1.0 Pro on 87% of the benchmarks used for developing our large language models (LLMs). And when compared to 1.0 Ultra on the same benchmarks, it performs at a broadly similar level.

Relevant problem-solving with longer blocks of code

Gemini 1.5 Pro can perform more relevant problem-solving tasks across longer blocks of code. It can reason across 100,000 lines of code, giving helpful solutions, modifications, and explanations.

As 1.5 Pro’s long context window is the first of its kind among large-scale models, Google is continuously developing new evaluations and benchmarks for testing its novel capabilities.

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Advantages of Gemini 1.5

Gemini 1.5 Pro comes as part of Google’s ongoing efforts to demonstrate its capabilities in the rapidly evolving field of artificial intelligence. Gemini 1.5 delivers dramatically enhanced performance. It represents a step change in our approach, building upon research and engineering innovations across nearly every part of our foundation model development and infrastructure. This includes making Gemini 1.5 more efficient in training and serving with a new Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture. 

As per the official blog, “Before today, the largest context window in the world for a publicly available large language model was 200,000 tokens. We’ve been able to significantly increase this, running up to 1 million tokens consistently, achieving the longest context window of any large-scale foundation model. Gemini 1.5 Pro will come with a 128,000 token context window by default, but today’s Private Preview will have access to the experimental 1 million token context window.”

The various significant advantages of Gemini 1.5 are: 

• The larger context window allows the model to take in more information, making the output more consistent, relevant, and useful. With the 1 million token context window, you will be able to load over 700,000 words of text in one go in different formats.

Source: Google Blog

• Gemini 1.5 enables a deep analysis of an entire codebase, helping Gemini models grasp complex relationships, patterns, and understandings of code. A developer could upload a new codebase directly from their computer or via Google Drive, and use the model to onboard quickly and gain an understanding of the code.

Source: Google Blog

• Gemini 1.5 Pro can also reason across up to 1 hour of video. When you attach a video, Google AI Studio breaks it down into thousands of frames (without audio), and then you can perform highly sophisticated reasoning and problem-solving tasks.

Source: Google Blog

After Gemini 1.5 and Gemini 1.5 Pro, Google also launched Gemini 1.5 Flash. This smaller Gemini model is optimized for narrower or high-frequency tasks where the speed of the model, and response time matter the most. Also, Google has made a series of quality improvements across key use cases, such as translation, coding, reasoning, and more, in Gemini 1.5 Pro. These updates in the model should help you tackle even broader and more complex tasks.

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