Undoubtedly, artificial intelligence has been a transformative and salient force across every sector globally following its aggressive boom heralded by Open AI’s GPT 3 in 2020. 

AI’s practical and beneficial day-to-day resourcefulness is poised to get even better, with the recent introductions of new models: GPT 4o and Gemini 1.5 Pro. Earlier this week—Monday, May 13 precisely—OpenAI, at the Spring Update event introduced its latest and most advanced AI model; GPT-4o, also known as Omni. 

We're opening up access to our new flagship model, GPT-4o, and features like browse, data analysis, and memory to everyone for free (with limits). https://t.co/H2dB6w7Ynz

— OpenAI (@OpenAI) May 13, 2024

Barely 24 hours later, Google followed suit by unveiling their latest AI model; Gemini 1.5 Pro at the Google I/O 2024 event that marked a new Gemini era.

“We’ve been investing in AI for more than a decade — and innovating at every layer of the stack: research, product, infrastructure, and we’re going to talk about it all today,” Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet said. 

“We are in the early days of the AI platform shift. We see so much opportunity ahead, for creators, for developers, for startups, for everyone. Helping to drive those opportunities is what our Gemini era is all about.” 

If AI has been a game changer hitherto, these newly introduced cutting-edge models from Google and OpenAI are expected to take it a notch further with access to unprecedented features that’ll usher in a new era of technical advancements.

Now that scores of users worldwide are embracing these flagship models for optimal productivity, let’s dissect their uniqueness, performance, similarities and differences across 4 metrics.

Chat GPT-4o vs Gemini 1.5 Pro: Intricacies and Subtle Differences

Speed

From all indications, ChatGPT-4o is faster than Gemini 1.5 Pro, although Google’s flagship can’t be described as slow.

Omni executes tasks almost instantaneously, and similar to human time response—overtaking the penultimate model GPT-4 Turbo.  “It matches GPT-4 Turbo performance on text in English and code, with significant improvement on text in non-English languages, while also being much faster,” OpenAI review reads. 

However, what the latest Gemini lacks in alacrity—up against ChatGPT 4o—it makes for in range. Gemini 1.5 Pro has the longest consumer AI chatbot in the world, making it well fortified to process multiple large documents, up to 1,500 pages total, according to Sissie Hsiao, Vice president and General Manager of Gemini Experiences and Google Assistant. 

Human-like Multimodalities

Both GPT-4o and Gemini 1.5 Pro have been foundationally saddled with human-like features: vision and audio.

Although GPT-4 could process voice prompts into text before transforming into voice, GPT-4o is built to execute voice commands instantaneously with voice output akin to conversations with fellow humans.

Say hello to GPT-4o, our new flagship model which can reason across audio, vision, and text in real time: https://t.co/MYHZB79UqN

Text and image input rolling out today in API and ChatGPT with voice and video in the coming weeks. pic.twitter.com/uuthKZyzYx

— OpenAI (@OpenAI) May 13, 2024

The same also goes for Gemini 1.5 Pro, though it’s imperative to note that this feature, plus vision still needs to be integrated into the models. Open AI and Google explicitly confirmed that the integration hasn’t been completed.

Language

Broadly speaking, both AI models are multilingual. But why Omni can communicate smoothly in over 50 languages, Google’s Gemini is over 35, across 150 countries.

Accessibility and Availability

Perhaps, this will be a major determinant in the amount of usage of both large language models (LLM)

While Gemini 1.5 Pro is strictly available to subscribers only, non-premium users have access—although somewhat limited—to the features of GPT-4o. 

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman explained on his blog, “A key part of our mission is to put very capable AI tools in the hands of people for free (or at a great price). I am very proud that we’ve made the best model in the world available for free in ChatGPT, without ads or anything like that.

We are a business and will find plenty of things to charge for, and that will help us provide free, outstanding AI service to (hopefully) billions of people.”