Category: Technologies

Reigning European champions Manchester City will look to end their group stage campaign with a 100% win record as they travel to Red Star Belgrade.

City have already claimed their spot as Group G winners following their 3-2 comeback win over RB Leipzig in game week 5, with boss Pep Guardiola likely to rotate his squad for this clash.

Red Star Belgrade, meanwhile, have little more than pride to play for with the Serbian side set to drop out of the tournament having picked up just a single point from their previous five matches.

Below, we’ll outline the best live TV streaming services for watching every game wherever you are in the world.

Red Star Belgrade vs. Man City: When and where?

Red Star Belgrade play Man City at the Rajko Mitić Stadium on Wednesday, Dec. 13. Kickoff is set for 6:45 p.m. CET local time in Belgrade, making it a 5:45 p.m. GMT kickoff in the UK (12:45 p.m. ET, 9:45 a.m. PT in the US and Canada, and 4:45 a.m. AEDT on Thursday, Dec 14, in Australia).

How to watch Red Star Belgrade vs. Man City online from anywhere using a VPN

If you’re unable to view Champions League matches locally, you may need a different way to watch the action; that’s where using a VPN can come in handy. A VPN can stop your ISP from throttling your speeds on game day by encrypting your traffic, and it’s also a great idea if you want an extra layer of privacy for your devices and log-ins while traveling and using various Wi-Fi networks.

With a VPN, you’re able to virtually change your location on your phone, tablet or laptop to access the game. If your internet provider or mobile carrier assigns an IP address that incorrectly shows your location in a blackout zone, a VPN can fix that problem by giving you an IP address in your correct, non-blackout area. Most VPNs, like our Editors’ Choice, ExpressVPN, make it really easy to do this.

Using a VPN to watch or stream sports is legal in any country where VPNs are legal, including the US, UK and Canada, as long as you have a legitimate subscription to the service you’re streaming. Be sure your VPN is set up correctly to prevent leaks: Even where VPNs are legal, the streaming service may terminate the account of anyone it suspects is circumventing correctly applied blackout restrictions.

Looking for other options? Be sure to check out some of the great VPN deals taking place right now.

Livestream Red Star Belgrade vs. Man City in the US

American soccer fans can stream this season’s tournament via Paramount Plus, which has exclusive live English-language broadcast rights in the US for UEFA Champions League matches.

Livestream Red Star Belgrade vs. Man City in the UK

TNT Sports (formerly known as BT Sport) has Champions League live broadcast rights in the UK.

Livestream Red Star Belgrade vs. Man City in Canada

If you want to stream UCL games live in Canada, subscribe to DAZN Canada. The service has exclusive broadcast rights to the Champions League this season.

Livestream Red Star Belgrade vs. Man City in Australia

Football fans Down Under can watch UCL matches on streaming service Stan Sport, which has exclusive rights to show the Champions League live in Australia this season.

Quick tips for streaming UEFA Champions League matches using a VPN

• With four variables at play (your ISP, browser, video streaming provider and VPN), your experience and success when streaming Champions League games may vary.
• If you don’t see your desired location as a default option for ExpressVPN, try using the “search for city or country” option.
• If you’re having trouble getting the game after you’ve turned on your VPN and set it to the correct viewing area, there are two things you can try for a quick fix. First, log into your streaming service subscription account and make sure the address registered for the account is in the correct viewing area. If not, you may need to change the physical address on file with your account. Second, some smart TVs including Roku don’t have VPN apps you can install directly on the device itself. Instead, you’ll have to install the VPN on your router or the mobile hotspot you’re using (like your phone) so that any device on its Wi-Fi network now appears in the correct viewing location.
• All of the VPN providers we recommend have helpful instructions on their main sites for quickly installing the VPN on your router. In some cases with smart TV services, after you install a cable network’s sports app, you’ll be asked to verify a numeric code or click a link sent to your email address on file for your smart TV. This is where having a VPN on your router will also help since both devices will appear to be in the correct location.
• Remember, browsers can often give away a location despite using a VPN, so be sure you’re using a privacy-first browser to log into your services. We recommend Brave.

Wikipedia earlier this month released its list of the 25 most viewed articles on English Wikipedia in 2023. As always, it’s a good sign of the times.

There’s a lot of what you’d expect on the list. The Barbie movie is on there (No. 13, with 18 million views). Taylor Swift, unsurprisingly, made the cut at No. 12 (19.4 million views). Movies, soccer players, celebrities who passed away too young, all made it. (Matthew Perry is at No. 17 with 16.4 million views, and Lisa Marie Presley is at No. 22 with 13.7 million.)

But the No. 1 most-viewed article, with a whopping 49.4 million views? It’s Wikipedia’s entry on ChatGPT, a chatbot developed by OpenAI and launched just over a year ago on Nov. 30, 2022. With its clever responses and ability to engage in a humanlike conversation, it captured the public’s attention and set off a wide-ranging conversation that’s still going strong 12 months later.

ChatGPT isn’t the only genAI chatbot out there. Microsoft’s Bing, for instance, began integrating AI into search in February and opened to more users in May. Google Bard also opened up to bigger audiences. (In a breakdown of the three services in the spring, CNET’s Imad Khan found ChatGPT to be the best, but noted that all three were learning and changing.) And there are yet more, including Character.ai and Claude.ai (the latter created by people who jumped from OpenAI).

Still, it’s ChatGPT that became the touchstone for many people when they think of AI — which we’re all probably doing a lot more than we did a year ago. Hence the enshrinement atop Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia and hugely popular resource. Students turn to it for homework help, sports and movie fans to answer those nagging trivia questions, job-seekers use it to research potential employers, and for most anyone, it’s much too easy to simply fall down a random-article rabbit hole and not emerge for hours. Wikipedia received more than 84 billion page views so far in 2023, according to data shared with CNN.

That top ranking for ChatGPT is a clear signal of how much the generative AI tool upended the zeitgeist in 2023 — and how little people still know about what it is or does.

From zero to No. 1 in one year

ChatGPT came on fast. Last year’s top Wikipedia entries list didn’t include ChatGPT, of course, since it was just days old then. But last year’s list also didn’t include any artificial intelligence-related entries. Deceased cannibal and murderer Jeffrey Dahmer topped the 2022 list with 54.9 million views, thanks to Monster, the Netflix series about his life and crimes.

The entry on ChatGPT isn’t the longest in Wikipedia. But it’s complex, with 210 footnotes cited. It defines what the bot is and gives a little history — ChatGPT gained over 100 million users by January and is now up to 150 million — and discusses its features, training and reception.

The GPT part of the name stands for generative pretrained transformer, and that training of the AI, on enormous troves of data, is the bedrock of the technology. With the GPT-4 upgrade in March to the underlying large language model — the tech that powers the chatbot so it’s able to generate answers with original content — ChatGPT can churn out longer strings of text, respond when given images and avoid some of the pitfalls of earlier versions. With those improvements, ChatGPT became smart enough to not only pass the bar exam, something it could already do, but score in the top 10%.

That fundamental training of ChatGPT isn’t without controversy. Writers including Game of Thrones author George R. R. Martin are part of a lawsuit against ChatGPT’s parent company, OpenAI, in which the plaintiffs allege that using their works was copyright infringement.

ChatGPT and Wikipedia: More alike than you think

It’s funny that ChatGPT, of all things, ended up topping the Wikipedia most-read list, because the two have similarities. You don’t have to know anything about a topic to use ChatGPT or Wikipedia for information — that’s why people turn to each of them. They’re a starting place. If you have more in-depth knowledge of a topic, you can narrow in on a specific Wikipedia entry or ChatGPT question.

Wikipedia, however, is assembled by human editors, and cites its sources. Sometimes Wikipedia entries have errors, whether unintentional or on purpose. Just check the page for a controversial public figure after they die — you’ll often see mean jokes and false descriptions thrown in, though the site cleans these up pretty fast.

But Wikipedia does a very good job of pulling together basics and telling you how to find out more.

On a good day, that’s what ChatGPT does too. Need to send a sensitive email to your boss or mother-in-law? ChatGPT doesn’t know that person, so it doesn’t know how to personalize the email with the specific details that will help it read better to the recipient. But it can sketch out the basic sentences that a person might use to ask for a meeting or to suggest a switch in family vacation plans.

When I was in school, we had old-fashioned, multivolume, paper-and-ink encyclopedias. And you better believe teachers put hard limits on their use as reference sources. They didn’t want you citing them in a paper — too easy, too lazy, not specific enough information.

Many teachers have similar rules for Wikipedia. You can start there and get a good sense of your topic, but don’t you dare let that be your resource. It would be nice to think of people using ChatGPT in the same way: as a starting push, an idea generator. Not for, uh, having AI write essays for school assignments that they pass off as their own work.

For now, it’s still early, but nearly 50 million people used Wikipedia to learn more about ChatGPT this year. That number’s likely to grow.

Getting existential

It’s under the “Use and Implications” header that things really start to get interesting.

The Wikipedia entry discusses the controversies surrounding the chatbot, from kids using it to cheat in school to the bot throwing back untrustworthy information or even hallucinations, when a generative AI tool makes up things that sound true. In fact, on Tuesday, Dictionary.com named the AI sense of “hallucinate” as its 2023 word of the year, defining it as “to produce false information contrary to the intent of the user, and present it as if true and factual.”

There’s also the big fear, the idea that AI’s power will lead to a Terminator-esque future, where the machines are no longer under human control. A Scientific American article in October discusses “AI anxiety,” a term explaining fears about the rapid rise of generative AI.

Many people are afraid AI will eventually take their jobs, and others have larger fears involving human obsolescence. I admit, I have a great deal of that AI anxiety for sure — I saw Terminator, after all. And as a Gen Xer, I’ve always been raised with the idea that human-caused destruction is just around the corner. It was in our songs, our books, our movies. Shall we play a game? How about global thermonuclear war?

Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI who in November was fired and rehired in the span of a week, earlier this month spoke on What Now? with Trevor Noah. Noah asked Altman about worries that genAI will cause the apocalypse. Altman’s answer wasn’t exactly reassuring to worrywarts like me.

“Society has … actually a fairly good, messy but good, process for collectively determining what safety thresholds should be,” Altman told Noah on the podcast. “I think we do as a world need to stare that in the face … this idea that there is catastrophic or potentially even existential risk in a way that just because we can’t precisely define it doesn’t mean we get to ignore it either. And so we’re doing a lot of work here to try to forecast and measure what those issues might be, when they might come, how we would detect them early.”

Thanks, I think? As Binkley famously told Milo in Bloom County, “well, you can just rock me to sleep tonight.”

Wikipedia, of course, may not offer the most nuanced explanation of ChatGPT or AI. But I’m strongly on the side of it hitting No. 1 on the Wikipedia list. The more people get a clear picture of this advancing technology — the good, the bad, and the unknown of it — the better off we’ll be.

Where will AI be next year?

I tell my teenage daughter and her friends not to worry too much about what careers they’ll have when they grow up, because those jobs probably haven’t been invented yet.

In much the same way, we just have no idea where ChatGPT will be in a year. It seems fair that it’ll be settling into some terrific uses, and naturally, creating more controversy about things we wish it couldn’t do.

If life was a Twilight Zone episode, we might be able to peer ahead somehow to next year’s list of Wikipedia’s most-viewed articles, and learn from them what the world went through in the 12 months of 2024. But we’re still in our world, so instead I asked ChatGPT if it could predict the most-viewed Wikipedia entries for next year. Its answer was both telling and vague, as you might expect.

“I wish I had a crystal ball for that!” ChatGPT responded. “Predicting the future is a bit tricky, especially when it comes to internet trends. But if I had to guess, it might be something related to a major global event, scientific discovery, or a breakthrough in technology. What’s your prediction?”

Editors’ note: CNET is using an AI engine to help create some stories. For more, see this post.

The iPhone 15 launched earlier this fall, and there are a variety of great deals right now on the newest iPhone, as well as last year’s iPhone 14. If you’ve got an older iPhone and don’t plan to switch to a newer model anytime soon, you’ll likely want to optimize your battery in order to keep your phone feeling as new as possible.

Most iPhone battery issues can be prevented by taking a few simple steps, like using “optimized charging,” avoiding overheating your iPhone and not letting the battery drain to zero.

Along with those iPhone battery best practices, other battery-saving tips for iOS 16 and iOS 17 are less obvious and can help you keep your iPhone’s battery alive longer.

In this story, we’ll cover two features in iOS 16 and iOS 17 that both put a strain on your iPhone’s battery to varying degrees and how you can turn them off to help preserve battery life. Here’s what you need to know.

And if you want some more battery savings tips and tricks, check out how to stop background apps from refreshing and how to replace your iPhone’s battery (cheaper than Apple).

Remove widgets from your iPhone lock screen

All the widgets on your lock screen force your apps to automatically run in the background, constantly fetching data to update the information the widgets display, like sports scores or the weather. Because these apps are constantly running in the background due to your widgets, that means they continuously drain power.

If you want to help preserve some battery on iOS 17, the best thing to do is simply avoid widgets on your lock screen (and home screen). The easiest way to do this is to switch to another lock screen profile: Press your finger down on your existing lock screen and then swipe around to choose one that doesn’t have any widgets.

If you want to just remove the widgets from your existing lock screen, press down on your lock screen, hit Customize, choose the Lock Screen option, tap on the widget box and then hit the “—” button on each widget to remove them.

Turn off your iPhone’s haptic keyboard feedback

Surprisingly, the keyboard on the iPhone has never had the ability to vibrate as you type, an addition called “haptic feedback” that was added to iPhone with iOS 16. Instead of just hearing click-clack sounds, haptic feedback gives each key a vibration, providing a more immersive experience as you type. According to Apple, the very same feature may also affect battery life.

According to this Apple support page about the keyboard, haptic feedback “might affect the battery life of your iPhone.” No specifics are given as to how much battery life the keyboard feature drains, but if you want to conserve battery, it’s best to keep this feature disabled.

Fortunately, it is not enabled by default. If you’ve enabled it yourself, go to Settings > Sounds & Haptics > Keyboard Feedback and toggle off Haptic to turn off haptic feedback for your keyboard.

For more tips on iOS, learn how to download the new iOS 17 and how to automatically delete multifactor authentication messages from texts and emails.

Apple’s iOS 17 was released on Sept. 18, shortly after the company held its “Wonderlust” event, where the tech giant announced the new iPhone 15 lineup, the Apple Watch Series 9 and the Apple Watch Ultra 2. We put together this cheat sheet to help you learn about and use the new features in iOS 17 and to help you keep track of the subsequent iOS 17 updates.

Getting started with iOS 17

• iOS 17 Review: StandBy Mode Changed My Relationship With My iPhone

• Whether or Not Your iPhone Supports iOS 17
• Do This Before Downloading iOS 17
• How to Download iOS 17 to Your iPhone

Using iOS 17

• Three iPhone Settings to Change after Downloading iOS 17
• iOS 17’s Best New Features
• The iOS 17 Features We’re Excited About
• iOS 17 Is Filled With Delightful Features, Intuitive Improvements and More
• 17 Hidden iOS 17 Features You Shouldn’t Miss
• iOS 17 Upgrades Your iPhone’s Keyboard
• You Can Tag Your Pets In Your ‘People’ Album With iOS 17
• How to Create Live Stickers in iOS 17

• How to Set Up Contact Posters in iOS 17
• How to Automatically Delete Two-Factor Verification Codes in iOS 17
• What to Know About iOS 17’s Unreleased Journal App

• How Good Are Offline Maps in iOS 17?
• How to Use iOS 17’s Live Voicemail Feature
• You Can Change Your Private Browsing Browser in iOS 17

• Hidden iOS 17 Feature Makes It Easier to Send Photos and Videos

• You Can Clone Your Voice with iOS 17. Here’s How

• Are Audio Message Transcripts in iOS 17 Any Good?

• Sharing AirTags in iOS 17 is Easy. Here’s How

• How to Create Camera Shortcuts in iOS 17

• What You Need to Know About the Improved Autocorrect in iOS 17
• Use This Hidden iOS 17 Feature to Reduce Eye Strain

• How to Enable Sensitive Content Warnings on Your iPhone

• Let Your Loved Ones Know You’re Safe With This iOS 17 Feature

• Simplify Your Grocery List With iOS 17

• How to Turn Off FaceTime Reactions in iOS 17
• What Is iOS 17’s Journal App and How Does It Work?
• You Can Use Albums for Photo Shuffle on Your Lock Screen

• Play Daily Crosswords in Apple News With iOS 17
• How to Turn Off the Most Annoying iOS 17 Features
• iOS 17.2 Supposedly Brings Better Wireless Charging to These iPhones

• How to Turn Inline Predictive Text Off With iOS 17.2

• This Security Feature Could Be Included in iOS 17.3

iOS 17 updates

• iOS 17.2 Brings These New Features to Your iPhone

• What iOS 17.1.2 Fixes on Your iPhone
• iOS 17.1.1 Patches These iPhone Issues

• What New Features iOS 17.1 Brings to Your iPhone
• What to Know About iOS 17.0.1

• Apple Made an iPhone 15 Mistake, but iOS 17.0.2 Is Here to Fix It

• iOS 17.0.3 Fixes This iPhone 15 Pro Problem

Make sure to check back periodically for more iOS 17 tips and how to use new features as Apple releases more updates.

17 Hidden iOS 17 Features and Settings on Your iPhone

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When Apple released its slightly updated AirPods Pro 2 with MagSafe Charging Case (USB‑C) earlier this year, it didn’t offer the USB-C charging case as a separate accessory. While the earlier AirPods Pro 2 buds — the ones that shipped with the Lightning case — charge in the new case, you were required to have purchased the USB-C AirPods Pro 2 to get a replacement case for them. But Apple has now lifted that restriction and is now selling the USB-C charging case for the AirPods Pro 2 to anyone who wants to buy one. It costs $99.

Read more: Best wireless earbuds

I supposed some folks who’ve bought one of the new iPhone 15 models with USB-C charging might want to get a USB-C charging case for their AirPod Pro 2 because they want to carry around only one cable to charge both their iPhone 15 and AirPods Pro 2. Or maybe you simply lost your Lightning-equipped case and figured you might as well shift to USB-C charging.

It’s worth noting that the new USB-C charging case has an IP54 rating, which means it’s dust-resistant and splash-proof. The Lightning version of the case doesn’t have a water- or dust-resistance rating.

Alas, while you can buy the upgraded AirPods Pro 2 charging case right now, shipping dates have slipped to Dec. 26-29, so it won’t make it in time for Christmas. But at least you’ll have it before New Year’s Day.

Read our full review of AirPods Pro 2 with MagSafe Charging Case (USB‑C).

The holidays are upon us, and so is the annual quandary of what to buy everyone. If, like me, you’re completely underprepared, then here’s the most 2023 way you can shop: with the help of artificial intelligence.

Though AI struggles with artistic endeavors like creating a story or Christmas carol (because it lacks human emotions and experiences), chatbots are adept at churning out lists. The secret lies in giving them a prompt with descriptors and hints.

This year we saw the explosion in popularity of generative AI chatbots, thanks to the late 2022 launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. In March, a huge upgrade came to the tech behind ChatGPT, a large language model called GPT-4, which has been trained on enormous data sets so it can generate answers with original content. It’s since been hailed as smart enough to pass the bar exam.

The field widened quickly with other contenders, including Microsoft’s Bing AI and Google’s Bard. The Bing search engine began incorporating info from OpenAI in search results, and Microsoft added a chat window where you can use AI to make shopping lists, summarize PDFs, generate LinkedIn posts and get advice.

You can use Bing AI chat without a Microsoft account in any browser, and in iOS and Android phone apps. It’s free to use.

Since one of this year’s updates involved AI tools for shopping — including auto-generated buying guides, product reviews and price matching — I decided to use Bing for my holiday 2023 shopping.

How to use Bing AI to generate personalized shopping lists

Getting set up

Microsoft has made it beyond simple to get things ready. I didn’t even have to switch from my preferred Chrome browser to Microsoft Edge. I simply went to the Bing site and clicked on the “chat” tab next to “search.” When I did the same on my phone, it directed me to download the Bing AI app on Android.

Make your prompt specific

When writing my prompt, I tried to be very specific. I gave as many details as I could think of about each person’s hobbies, interests and likes, down to how many children or grandchildren they had and their ages.

The first person I sought a gift suggestion for was my husband, and among the eight likes I listed, I mentioned “Marvel movies.” This turned out to be a mistake; almost every single one of the AI’s recommendations pointed to Marvel merchandise.

Refine the prompt

I removed the Marvel reference and added other details, like another hobby and the ages of our kids. I also experimented with the settings — there are toggles for “more creative,” “more precise” and “more balanced.” I found the best gift suggestions came from selecting the “more creative” option.

Downloading the Bing app and using that for the search also yielded more-detailed results, with slightly different suggestions.

The “be specific, then refine” formula works for all your gift recipients: Provide as many details as possible about their hobbies and likes; then use the answer the AI spits out to reword whatever the chatbot may be misunderstanding.

Putting it to the test

If you lift the curtain, you can pretty easily see how the magic trick happens. Clicking one of the links provided in the detailed responses to my queries led me to sites and pages the AI tool scraped, including “best gifts for stepdads” and “best gifts for your brother in law.”

But one important thing to note is that though it recognizes those familial titles, AI doesn’t understand relationships, like the role of a spouse. Its recommendations regarding my husband included a dinnerware set and a streaming service subscription, which might be odd gifts for someone you share a home (and streaming accounts) with.

That said, it does save time. I didn’t have to search for and read multiple yearly lists of gift suggestions. Bing AI scoured the web for them and generated a shortlist in seconds. Still, while the AI’s lists conform to your guidance, there’s value in human-curated holiday buying advice, like CNET’s own.

What went wrong?

Another limitation: Though some of the responses to my early prompts were good, they didn’t include the cost of an item or point me to where I could buy it. I refined again, asking for prices and Amazon links. The results were mixed.

It got prices in there just fine, but the AI significantly pared down the number of suggested gifts to make that happen.

And my request for links didn’t work at all — the AI continued to link only to the articles it scraped. (OpenAI said recently that it knows ChatGPT has been “getting lazier” since a November update.)

Even asking a follow-up question (“Can you give me links to where I can buy those suggestions?”) resulted only in links to a few different instances of just one gift suggestion, and when I clicked the links, most went to a different product entirely.

The verdict on AI for buying gifts

Using an AI chatbot to help with your holiday shopping will give you a decent list of gift suggestions as a starting point. But you’ll then have to search for them yourself on Amazon, Etsy or other stores to actually find, examine and buy them.

I will follow some of its gift suggestions, like PS5 games for my brothers; a board game based on someone’s favorite Disneyland ride; official merchandise for a friend who loves country music; a gas station gift card for my RV-loving stepdad; a cocktail subscription for a cousin who likes mixing drinks; and a personalized book from my toddlers to their dad.

It’s nothing groundbreaking, and these are things I might’ve thought of anyway, but AI takes the writer’s block out of the list-making process. The verdict on whether the gifts were actually good suggestions is out until Dec. 25, when we’ll start the annual game of “does their facial expression mean they loved or hated that gift?”

Editors’ note: CNET is using an AI engine to help create some stories. For more, see this post.

If you want a tablet with serious power, the Apple iPad Pro is one of the best tablets on the market. The 2022 model is the latest in this high-end lineup, but the 2021 iPad Pro still has plenty to offer, and it’s a solid value when you can pick it up on sale. Woot is currently offering $389 off the 12.9-inch model with cellular connectivity and 128GB of storage, which drops the price down to $810. This deal is available through Dec. 22, but there’s a chance it may sell out before then, so we’d recommend getting your order in sooner rather than later if you don’t want to miss out on these savings.

Despite being a couple of years old, this 2021 iPad Pro still comes packed full of advanced hardware that makes it one of the fastest and most advanced tablets out there. It features a stunning 12.9-inch Liquid Retina XDR mini-LED display, which boasts 1,600 nits of peak brightness, a smooth 120Hz refresh rate and supports Apple’s True Tone technology, making it a great pick for digital artists or other creatives.

Internally, it’s equipped with Apple’s powerful M1 chip, as well as 8GB of RAM and Wi-Fi 6 support for lightning-fast performance. Plus the 12-megapixel front camera automatically keeps you centered, which makes it great for video calls and virtual meetings. It averages around 10 hours of battery life on a single charge and uses a USB-C charger, so you don’t have to worry about keeping an Apple Lightning cable on hand.

It’s also worth noting that the second-generation Apple Pencil, which can help you unlock the full potential of this tablet, is also on sale for just $89 right now, which saves you $40 compared to the usual price. And if the iPad Pro isn’t for you, we’re rounding up the best iPad deals this side of Christmas including sales on the iPad Air, iPad Mini and entry-level iPad.

Google has begun bringing an understanding of video, audio and photos to its Bard AI chatbot with a new AI model called Gemini. Google Pixel 8 phone owners will be among the first to tap into its new artificial intelligence abilities, but Gemini will come to Gmail and other Google Workspace tools in early 2024.

People in dozens of countries first got access to Gemini with a Bard chatbot update in early December, though only in English. It can provide text-based chat abilities that Google says improves AI abilities in complex tasks like summarizing documents, reasoning, planning and writing programming code. The bigger change with multimedia abilities — for example understanding hand gestures in a video or figuring out the result of a child’s dot-to-dot drawing puzzle — will arrive “soon,” Google said.

The new version spotlights the breakneck pace of advancement in the new generative AI field, where chatbots create their own responses to prompts that we write in plain language rather than arcane programming instructions. Google’s top competitor, OpenAI, stole a march with the launch of ChatGPT a year ago, but Gemini is Google’s third major AI model revision and expects to deliver that technology through products that billions of us use, like search, Chrome, Google Docs and Gmail.

On Wednesday, Google also brought Gemini to programmers, a key community of people who can incorporate the technology into their own software. That’s through the basic Google AI Studio web interface or the more sophisticated Vertex AI. And for usage beyond a free low rate, Google cut prices by a factor of two to four. That could help encourage developers enamored of OpenAI’s programming interface to at least kick the tires on Gemini.

By courting developers, Google is more likely to spread Gemini to the software tools those programmers build for you. Google is building Gemini into its own services as well, notably with the Duet AI assistant in Gmail, Google Docs, Meet and other parts of Google Workspace.

“Duet AI for workspace will move to Gemini in the very early part of 2024,” said Thomas Kurian, chief executive of the Google Cloud division. That could help you turn a hand drawing of an airplane into a photorealistic version for a Google Slides presentation, for example, or in Google Meet it could help you better understand a videoconference that includes slides that aren’t in your native language. “Gemini’s multimodal understanding allows it to do much richer summaries of meetings,” he said.

Gemini is a dramatic departure for AI. Text-based chat is important, but humans must process much richer information as we inhabit our three-dimensional, ever-changing world. And we respond with complex communication abilities, like speech and imagery, not just written words. Gemini is an attempt to come closer to our own fuller understanding of the world.

Gemini comes in three versions tailored for different levels of computing power, Google said:

• Gemini Nano runs on mobile phones, with two varieties available built for different levels of available memory. It’ll power new features on Google’s Pixel 8 phones, like summarizing conversations in its Recorder app or suggesting message replies in WhatsApp typed with Google’s Gboard.
• Gemini Pro, tuned for fast responses, runs in Google’s data centers and will power a new version of Bard, starting Wednesday.
• Gemini Ultra, limited to a test group for now, will be available in a new Bard Advanced chatbot due in early 2024. Google declined to reveal pricing details, but expect to pay a premium for this top capability.

“For a long time we wanted to build a new generation of AI models inspired by the way people understand and interact with the world — an AI that feels more like a helpful collaborator and less like a smart piece of software,” said Eli Collins, a product vice president at Google’s DeepMind division. “Gemini brings us a step closer to that vision.”

OpenAI also supplies the brains behind Microsoft’s Copilot AI technology, including the newer GPT-4 Turbo AI model that OpenAI released in November. Microsoft, like Google, has major products like Office and Windows to which it’s adding AI features.

AI gets smarter, but it’s not perfect

Multimedia likely will be a big change compared to text when it arrives. But what hasn’t changed is the fundamental problems of AI models trained by recognizing patterns in vast quantities of real-world data. They can turn increasingly complex prompts into increasingly sophisticated responses, but you still can’t trust that they didn’t just provide an answer that was plausible instead of actually correct. As Google’s chatbot warns when you use it, “Bard may display inaccurate info, including about people, so double-check its responses.”

Gemini is the next generation of Google’s large language model, a sequel to the PaLM and PaLM 2 that have been the foundation of Bard so far. But by training Gemini simultaneously on text, programming code, images, audio and video, it’s able to more efficiently cope with multimedia input than with separate but interlinked AI models for each mode of input.

Examples of Gemini’s abilities, according to a Google research paper (PDF), are diverse.

Looking at a series of shapes consisting of a triangle, square and pentagon, it can correctly guess the next shape in the series is a hexagon. Presented with photos of the moon and a hand holding a golf ball and asked to find the link, it correctly points out that Apollo astronauts hit two golf balls on the moon in 1971. It converted four bar charts showing country-by-country waste disposal techniques into a labeled table and spotted an outlying data point, namely that the US throws a lot more plastic in the dump than other regions.

The company also showed Gemini processing a handwritten physics problem involving a simple sketch, figuring out where a student’s error lay, and explaining a correction. A more involved demo video showed Gemini recognizing a blue duck, hand puppets, sleight-of-hand tricks and other videos. None of the demos were live, however, and it’s not clear how often Gemini fumbles such challenges.

Was Google’s Gemini video fake?

Google touted Gemini in a demonstration video purporting to show it recognizing hand gestures, following magic tricks, and putting pictures of planets in order by how far the planets are from the sun — all from visual data. You should think of that as a dramatization of the Gemini’s true abilities, however.

It’s not uncommon for promotional videos to make products look more glamorous than they truly are. In this case, you might think Gemini was processing video input data and spoken instructions. Google included some fine print: a disclaimer in the video that Gemini doesn’t respond as quickly, and a link in the video description to a discussion of how Google’s Gemini demo actually worked. You might not have noticed any of that, though. Google also followed up with a post on X, formerly Twitter, that shows how fast Gemini actually does respond.

Still, the video doesn’t fundamentally misrepresent Gemini’s abilities, though outsiders haven’t generally been able to test it. It can accept spoken and video input.

Gemini Ultra coming in 2024

Gemini Ultra awaits further testing before appearing next year.

“Red teaming,” in which a product-maker enlists people to find security vulnerabilities and other problems, is underway for Gemini Ultra. Such tests are more complicated with multimedia input data. For example, a text message and photo could each be innocuous on their own, but when paired could convey dramatically different meaning.

“We’re approaching this work boldly and responsibly,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in a blog post. That means a combination of ambitious research with big potential payoffs, but also adding safeguards and working collaboratively with governments and others “to address risks as AI becomes more capable.”

Editors’ note: CNET is using an AI engine to help create some stories. For more, see this post.

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