According to reports, Google has delayed the launch of Gemini until January, just one month away. This is after announcing the AI at the Google I/O 2023, the company had postponed the launch of Gemini to the first quarter of next year, and Sundar Pichai has scrapped a series of events for Gemini starting next week.

The main cited reason is that Google is trying to match or surpass OpenAI’s GPT-4. According to the new report, the company believes that it has “met that standard in some respect.” The focus is currently on global language support.

The delay suggests that Google is facing challenges in the development of Gemini, putting it in a catch-up position with OpenAI. Pichai said that he found that the model wasn’t reliable in handling non-english queries.

At the recent earnings call, Google chief spoke about Project Gemini, briefly. “We are just really laying the foundation of what I think of as the next-generation series of models we’ll be launching all throughout 2024,” shared Pichai, hinting that it would be multimodal – highly efficient with the tool and API integrations – and is going to be available in various sizes and capabilities.

He said that Gemini would be used immediately across all their products internally as well as bringing it out for both developers and cloud customers via Vertex AI. 

​​In the meantime, Google’s counterpart to ChatGPT, Bard, has struggled to gain traction. This poses a challenge for Google, as ChatGPT’s numerous users contribute valuable data crucial for OpenAI to monitor and enhance the quality of its products. ChatGPT has over 100 million weekly users as of now.

This is when Google had the perfect chance to release its model amidst all the chaos that has been going at the OpenAI office, with Sam Altman getting fired and the constant instability. Moreover, AWS has also announced its Q chatbot to compete in the same space. Only Google is left.