ChatGPT vs Google Gemini (2024): What Are the Main Differences?

ChatGPT and Google Gemini are AI chatbots designed to generate responses to prompts. When used appropriately, ChatGPT and Google Gemini can support certain business processes in content production, development and more. Take a look at each tool’s features, pros and cons to see which AI chatbot would be best for your business.

What is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is an AI chatbot developed by OpenAI that generates human-like responses based on text input. It has been trained on a huge amount of internet text and enabled by the large language model GPT-4.

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What is Google Gemini?

Like ChatGPT, Google Gemini can answer questions and generate text from prompts. Google Gemini was originally released as Google Bard, a chatbot based on the LaMDA family of large language models. In February 2024, Google introduced Gemini, which was trained on the large language model PaLM, and folded the Bard brand name into Gemini.

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ChatGPT vs. Google Gemini: Comparison table

Google Gemini vs ChatGPT: Main differences

One major difference is that the free version of ChatGPT lacks up-to-date information, while Gemini can access the internet.

The underpinnings of the two AI chatbots are also different: ChatGPT is based on OpenAI’s GPT 4o mini or GPT-4o, depending on free or paid access, and Gemini is based on Google’s Gemini Ultra, Pro or Nano, depending on the language and country. Gemini can interpret images, is interoperable and supports extensions that draw data from Google products such as Google Flights, Hotels, Maps, Drive, Gmail, Docs and YouTube. An upgrade to ChatGPT Plus allows access to many third-party plugins for expanded functionality.

Gemini allows people to upload files for analysis, identification or captioning, which is not possible in ChatGPT. An upgrade to ChatGPT Plus, however, allows image analysis features as well as the ability to create an image from a prompt.

SEE: OpenAI unveiled an AI-powered rival to Google Search.

ChatGPT and Google Gemini pricing

ChatGPT

ChatGPT’s basic version is free. For $20 per month, ChatGPT Plus gives subscribers faster response times and access to new features and GPT-4, GPT-4o or GPT-4o mini (the free version provides access to GPT-4o mini). The GPT-4 API was made generally available in July 2023. The ChatGPT Team plan adds management of team account roles and the ability to share conversations and GPTs among team members.

Google Gemini

Google Gemini is free, with an unlimited number of questions. Gemini Advanced, which adds more storage, integration into other Google applications and more, costs $19.99 per month.

Feature comparison: ChatGPT vs. Google Gemini

Text generation

ChatGPT and Google Gemini are useful tools for producing text –– anything from summarizing information to generating a list to creating a poem to writing an essay. Ask either AI system to explain a topic, compare or contrast two or more things or draft an email, and you’ll likely obtain a useful response.

Conversational responses

ChatGPT and Google Gemini are trained on datasets that include hundreds of billions of parameters, which results in remarkably human-like responses. Since Google Gemini has instant access to the internet, it can produce more current responses than ChatGPT.

For instance, if asked “What happened yesterday in Budapest?” Google Gemini can give several bullet points of news events, whereas ChatGPT makes inferences based on the data available as of the most recent training update. However, ChatGPT Plus can browse the internet and return similarly up-to-date answers as Google Gemini.

Employs context

ChatGPT collects information from previous conversations and prior interactions with the user, which means it can use context when engaging in a chat. Gemini can also use context in conversations and can pick up where a user left off.

For instance, if you ask: “What do you think about the new employee description I mentioned the other day?” Gemini can respond using the previous cues. However, it sometimes struggles. In this case, “the first Moon mission I asked about” was Chandrayaan-3. Neither of these systems offer as long a context window as another generative AI alternative: Claude.

Uploads: Images and documents

Google Gemini lets you upload an image and ask the system to analyze and tell you details about the image or create a caption for it.

While the free version of ChatGPT does not support image uploads, an upgrade to ChatGPT Plus not only allows image upload, analysis and captioning, but it also lets you create an image with a prompt. For example, you use a text prompt to create an image to illustrate a story, suggest a setting or convey a concept. Similarly, you may upload a document, such as a PDF, then ask ChatGPT questions about the document or for a summary.

ChatGPT pros and cons

Pros of ChatGPT

• Speedy response times: ChatGPT is superior to previous generations of AI chatbots because of the speed of its responses, which makes it help businesses become more efficient.
• Ability to generate human-like responses: ChatGPT can produce more natural-sounding text than previous generations of AI chatbots, largely due to the vast amount of data it has been trained on.
• User friendly: ChatGPT can perform a wide range of tasks, from translating to condensing paragraphs to producing song lyrics, and it can do so for a wide audience. Its simple interface and straightforward responses make it an easy tool for those without technical expertise.
• Supports many programming languages: ChatGPT supports Python, JavaScript, Java and a dozen other programming languages.
• Supports 20+ languages: ChatGPT “can understand and generate text” in more than 20 languages.

Cons of ChatGPT

• Limited accuracy and reliability: ChatGPT’s responses may contain errors since it is using training data. It is also not current, although ChatGPT Plus allows access to internet information.
• Hidden bias: ChatGPT may produce biased responses due to the dataset it is trained on. The source material itself may contain biases, which can affect the responses offered by ChatGPT. For instance, ChatGPT is not great at answering questions that are not in English and may produce errors.
• No real-world understanding: ChatGPT is limited to the dataset it was trained on, and though it can produce impressive responses, it is based on what is available online, not what has been learned through real human experience.

Google Gemini pros and cons

Pros of Google Gemini

• High-quality text generation: Google Gemini can produce human-like text that can be used for a range of tasks, from answering queries to summarizing material to translating text.
• Large dataset: Google Gemini is pretrained on a massive dataset of text and code, which allows it to generate more comprehensive and informative responses than smaller models.
• Creative text output: Google Gemini can assist in creating a variety of text, from job descriptions to hiring letters to writing reports, which makes it a versatile tool for the enterprise.
• Write code in many programming languages: Google claims that Gemini can generate code for simple and complex tasks alike in several programming languages from prompts written in natural language.
• Language support: Gemini supports more than 40 languages.

Cons of Google Gemini

• Computational resources: Large transformer models use a lot of computational resources.
• An experiment: As an experiment, Gemini may get things wrong or provide inaccurate information.

Cautions when using AI chatbots

ChatGPT and Google Gemini are still in development and may contain errors or biases. Therefore, users should be critical of the information provided by ChatGPT and Google Gemini to ensure its accuracy.

In addition, there are privacy concerns that come along with using ChatGPT or Google Gemini, which collect personal information much like search engines do. Your IP address, text and even links to your data, like phone, email and social media, can be gathered.

Should your organization use ChatGPT or Google Gemini?

ChatGPT and Google Gemini are free — unless you opt for the paid plans — and both AI chatbots are trained on large natural language models, meaning their responses tend to be similar.

Google Gemini has several features that help it stand out. For one, you can get “draft” versions of the response, which offers a variety of responses. Further, Google Gemini is completely up-to-date, with access to online information.

ChatGPT, on the other hand, provides impressive responses but lacks access to current internet information. ChatGPT Plus — with GPT-4o, access to DALL-E for images, browsing and advanced data analysis — is widely considered the leading AI chatbot.

It’s important to remember that both AI chatbots can be prone to error and bias and collect your personal data — not just the information you input — and can be tools of misuse for bad actors. Learn more about how generative AI works, along with its benefits and dangers.

Methodology

We evaluated these products based on the free versions of ChatGPT and Google Gemini, which are free by default. We tested out how the two AI chatbots would answer the same questions, and we asked ChatGPT and Google Gemini about more current news items to test their limitations.

Editor’s note: This article was originally written by Hope Reese. It was updated by Megan Crouse and extensively updated by Andy Wolber.