Google has reportedly started testing its most advanced AI model to date, Gemini, which it says has impressive multimodal capabilities.

Google is gearing up to release its much-anticipated conversational AI system Gemini, setting the stage for an all-out AI battle royale with OpenAI's ChatGPT.

According to a report by The Information, Google has opened up testing of Gemini to select companies, indicating its consumer launch could be imminent. Gemini is a multimodal LLM, which means that it can natively receive inputs of different modalities —for example, text, image, audio, etc.

“Gemini was created from the ground up to be multimodal,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said at the Google i/o keynote of in May. While still early, we’re already seeing impressive multimodal capabilities not seen in prior models,” he added.

This would pit the tech titan against OpenAI's smash hit chatbot ChatGPT, which has been making serious waves since its launch last November. From fintech to healthcare, businesses are already shelling out big bucks to tap into its uncanny conversational abilities.

But Pichai appears unruffled by the prospect of an AI duel.

"It’s not fully clear to me that it might have worked out as well,” Pichai told Wired when asked if Google should have put out a ChatGPT competitor sooner.

Pichai has been ramping up investment in what he calls Google's "AI-first future" since 2016. But he believes more time was needed to refine its models before primetime. "I feel very comfortable about where we are,” he said.

Google's initial launch of its LaMDA-based chatbot Bard in February was a bit of a flop after it flubbed basic facts about the James Webb telescope. But Bard has since gotten a major upgrade to tap into Google's new multimodal model PaLM 2, which "significantly outperforms" its predecessor, as Decrypt could confirm in a comparison.