Summary

• Gemini Advanced offers a comprehensive package with Google One subscription, cloud storage, and integration with Google apps, making it a high-value option compared to ChatGPT Plus.
• Gemini Advanced performs significantly faster than ChatGPT Plus in various tasks like text summarization, image generation, and coding, providing quick and efficient results.
• While ChatGPT Plus excels in Python programming and file analysis, Gemini Advanced surpasses it in poetry writing, offering better quality and versatility in generating creative content.

Google just revealed Gemini, a rebrand of Google Bard that has its own subscription tier called Gemini Advanced. Advanced comes as a part of an "AI Premium" Google One subscription that anyone can purchase, whereas ChatGPT Plus is just, well, a ChatGPT tier in its own enclave. Gemini Advanced is powered by the Gemini Ultra model, which Google claims outperforms GPT-4, and we put that to the test.

Gemini Advanced gives you more for your money

Gemini Advanced comes with a whole Google One subscription

At $20 for Gemini Advanced, it's already competitive with ChatGPT Plus and Copilot Pro in terms of pricing, but that's not all that you get. Google has it packaged as a part of an "AI Premium" tier of Google One, where you also get 2TB of Google Drive storage, Gemini in Google's suite of applications like Docs, Sheets, and more, and other features like longer Meet calls. It's a pretty large package of things you get for your money, and you can never have enough cloud storage.

In contrast, ChatGPT Plus really only just gives you ChatGPT with GPT-4. You don't get any cloud storage and you don't get any integration into any particular software, but it's not completely behind. You can generate images in ChatGPT Plus and you can also create custom GPTs, use plugins, and run Python code, which Gemini cannot do currently. Still, for most people I'd argue that the value per dollar invested in Gemini Advanced is higher, but it depends what you really want to use AI for.

Gemini Advanced is so much faster than ChatGPT Plus

Not to mention more informative

To be totally honest, the biggest downside of ChatGPT Plus is how slow it can be at generating responses. I asked Gemini Advanced to generate me a game of tic-tac-toe in Python, which it was able to do in three seconds. For contrast, it took ChatGPT Plus 40 seconds to do that, though its response was slightly longer. It wasn't ten times as long, though. I've found Gemini Advanced to be similarly as quick in other contexts, so it's not as if ChatGPT Plus simply just struggled with this particular task.

For anything I've asked ChatGPT to do, Gemini Advanced has simply been faster. Text summarization, image generation, and coding are all things that Google's model are doing significantly faster. That doesn't necessarily mean better, but for most people who just want a quick answer to something, then Gemini Advanced is probably a better option. Gemini Advanced certainly feels a lot closer to the dream of LLMs being a replacement for search engines, that's for sure.

It's not all perfect for Gemini Advanced though, as ChatGPT Plus surprisingly pulls out a handful of big wins.

ChatGPT Plus is better for programming in Python

Python is one of the biggest programming languages in the world

Something that Gemini Advanced advertises is its programming prowess, but the problem is that ChatGPT Plus is actually significantly better if you're a developer that does a lot of data analysis in Python. ChatGPT Plus can understand files that you upload and process them, conducting analysis on CSV files for example. You can make charts and tables with ChatGPT too this way, and that's not something Gemini Advanced can do.

Even better, ChatGPT Plus will run the Python code for you. To solve mathematical problems it will run Python code, to analyze data files it will as well, and it will share that code with you so that you can run it on your own machine as well. I recently had to seed a Valorant tournament by order of player ranks, and I was able to use ChatGPT Plus to streamline the process and calculate the average rank per team. Gemini Advanced, in its current state, can't do that.

With that said, the act of not being able to upload files at all to Gemini Advanced (sans images) seems odd. It feels very Google to push for showing off data analysis in a product, and Gemini not having it at all is quite strange. If you're a programmer or data analyst, I highly recommend giving ChatGPT Plus a try, especially because it'll run the code for you and analyze things in your browser or in the app.

ChatGPT Plus also seems better at images

Gemini Advanced will make more of them, but the quality is worse

I gave both Gemini Advanced and ChatGPT Plus the following prompt:

"Draw a photo of a cat flying in space, wearing a helmet and waving at a very tall person standing on top of pluto"

First up is Google's drawing, which was the better of the two.

Even though it's better, the quality is... odd. I don't really know how to describe it, except the entire thing is uncanny in a bad way. The quality seems off, the cat isn't even in a space suit... it doesn't make any sense, right? Things go from bad to worse with the second image it generated, as this one doesn't even make sense.

I don't really understand how Gemini Advanced generated this image, or where it understood the prompt from. Both images were generated with the same prompt, but it feels as if the second image used an entirely different prompt. It was faster, but the quality is clearly lacking. On the other side, ChatGPT Plus with DALL-E 3 did a great job with this prompt, given its absurdity.

The above image more accurately depicts the prompt that I gave, as eerie as it comes across, and DALL-E 3 simply seems to have the lead here when it comes to image generation. While I'm sure Google will get better at it, right now if images are your goal, I'd personally recommend going with DALL-E 3 in ChatGPT Plus instead of going with Gemini Advanced.

Poetry writing

For a bit of fun, I decided to see if GPT-4 could out-poet Gemini Advanced

People use LLMs to write poems all the time, even if it's just for a bit of fun. As a result, I decided to give that a shot too. Gemini Advanced, to be honest, smoked GPT-4 entirely, to the point that I was kind of surprised. I started with the following prompt:

"Write a poem about a robot that loves Nutella but is sad that it cannot taste it"

It's a bit of a random prompt, I know, but the point is that it requires something a bit more abstract than just a basic topic. First, Gemini Advanced:

I enjoyed what Gemini Advanced cooked up here, and it also generated very quickly. Let's compare it to ChatGPT Plus, which I feel fell behind in this task, and later on, completely failed.

Both are pretty cute, right? I personally prefer what Gemini Advanced did with it, but I decided to throw both LLMs a curveball. I asked them to re-write the poem in the style of Post Malone. The crossover of a robot not being able to have Nutella was difficult enough, but throwing in an entirely unrelated artist straight up confused ChatGPT Plus. First up, Gemini Advanced.

It's fairly cringe, but an overall success. It successfully captured the vibe of Post Malone, and managed to do something fairly unique with a subject matter that I honestly expected it to struggle with. ChatGPT Plus, though, didn't really get the memo of what that meant.

ChatGPT Plus seemed to instead incorporate a mention of Post Malone into the poem itself, rather than re-writing it in the style of Post Malone. It's a surprising miss from GPT-4, but an even more impressive win for Gemini Advanced.

Text summarization

ChatGPT and Gemini Advanced will both do well

You can ask ChatGPT or Gemini Advanced to sum up a piece of text for you, so I asked them to sum up my Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 review. They both gave some pretty decent results, enough that I'd be happy to use either of them. Neither would expand further than what they gave me, with ChatGPT telling me that it "can't." I assume that this is an issue of copyright, which makes sense given the ongoing lawsuits that OpenAI faces.

First and foremost, Gemini Advanced provided me the following:

"This is an article about the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset. It discusses the performance gains over the previous generation chip, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2. The 8 Gen 3 offers significant improvements in CPU and GPU performance. However, the author doesn't feel the need to upgrade from the 8 Gen 2 to the 8 Gen 3 because the 8 Gen 2 is still very powerful. The author concludes that the 8 Gen 3 is a great option for those who want the best possible performance, but for most people the 8 Gen 2 is still a good choice."

Following that, GPT-4 gave me this:

"The Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 review on XDA Developers presents the chipset as a significant upgrade over its predecessor, particularly in CPU and GPU performance. The author, Adam Conway, highlights the chip's big CPU gains, improved computational capabilities, and focus on AI. Despite these advancements, Conway notes that for many users, the performance of the previous generation (Snapdragon 8 Gen 2) might still be sufficient, suggesting that the need to upgrade might not be compelling for everyone. This iteration is seen as powerful, but the improvements may not justify an upgrade for all users."

To be honest, I prefer GPT-4's summary of the article, but both are more than acceptable. I also think that it will differ on an article-to-article basis, and in ChatGPT's case, I had to upload a PDF of the page as it couldn't access it. Gemini Advanced could though, but that's a negative of Google's product to be honest: there's no opportunity to upload an alternative if it's needed.

Which is the best for you?

Unless you're a data scientist, i think that Gemini Advanced is better

Unless you need the Python capabilities of ChatGPT and the ability to run code in your browser and upload files of any kind, then I think Gemini Advanced is better for most people. It's the same price and not only do you get a powerful LLM that's capable of just as much as GPT-4 is (more, if you take Google's word for it), but you also get 2TB of cloud storage and integration into Google's suite of apps too. If anything, all of this makes it a Copilot Pro competitor rather than a ChatGPT Plus competitor.

We'll be waiting to see how Gemini Advanced adapts and improves over time, but it's clear that ChatGPT Plus is starting to find itself some formidable competitors. Its first-mover advantage can only stick around so long, and eventually, it'll need to catch up with the competition.