Google has given a small group of companies access to an early version of its highly anticipated conversational artificial intelligence software, according to three people with direct knowledge of the matter. Giving outside developers access to the software, known as Gemini, means Google is about to incorporate it into its consumer services and sell it to businesses through the company’s cloud unit.
Gemini aims to compete with OpenAI’s GPT-4 model, which has begun to generate significant income for the startup as financial institutions and other businesses pay to access the model and the ChatGPT chatbot it powers.