Gemini 1.5 Pro: An Ultra-Efficient, Multimodal System

The release of Gemini 1.5 Pro stands as a testament to Google's formidable AI prowess. Its native multimodal abilities and huge step up in context length demonstrate an impressive capacity to scale alongside unimodal abilities, highlighting a significant leap in making AI more adaptable and versatile than ever before.

Here's what you need to know:

• 1.5 Pro is often better than 1.0 Ultra: demonstrates Google's broad and comprehensive approach to AI development.
• Huge leap in context length: signals fading importance of RAG (retrieval augmented generation)
• Power laws sustained: Native multimodal abilities scale as unimodal abilities do signaling efficiency of architecture

According to the paper: Gemini 1.5 Pro handles millions of tokens of context, including multiple long documents and hours of video and audio. It achieves near-perfect recall on long-context retrieval tasks across modalities. It also shows continued improvement in next-token prediction and near-perfect retrieval (>99%) up to at least 10M tokens, a generational leap over existing models such as Claude 2.1 (200k) and GPT-4 Turbo (128k). It is even able to surpass Gemini 1.0 Ultra on many tasks while requiring a lot less compute to train.

Gemini 1.5 Pro is a sparse Mixture-of-Expert (MoE) Transformer-based model. MoE enhances the architecture with a learned routing function to direct inputs to specific subsets of the model's parameters. This method enables the model to handle extremely long contexts efficiently, supporting inputs up to 10 million tokens without performance degradation. The MoE approach allows for scaling parameter counts while maintaining a constant number of activated parameters for any given input, pushing the limits of efficiency and long-context performance.

In plain English: an MoE model allows a computer to handle a vast amount of information very efficiently. Mixture of Experts (MoE) are like having a huge library of knowledge (a large number of parameters) but with a smart system that knows exactly which "books" (or parts of the model) to consult for any given question. This system directs the question to the most relevant experts (parts of the model) without needing to check every single book. This way, even as the library grows bigger and bigger, the system can still find answers quickly and efficiently, because it only ever uses a small, relevant portion of the library at any one time. It can grow its library as big as it needs to without slowing down, because it only ever uses a small part of its library to answer each question.