Gemini

Ask the AI a question, get an answer grounded in fresh Google Search — and it is continuous with Gmail, Docs, and YouTube. That is the world of Google Gemini. Gemini is a conversational AI built by Google (and the family of models behind it), broadly embedded across mobile apps, the web, Google Workspace, and Android, and multimodal across text, images, audio, and video. Models split into "the fast and cheap Flash family" and "the smart Pro family" — latest are Gemini 3.5 Flash and 3.1 Pro. Pricing runs Free / Plus $7.99 / Pro $19.99 / Ultra $99.99 (Ultra cut from $249.99), and 2026 moved to compute-based usage limits. This article covers the model lineup, key features (Deep Research, Gems, Canvas, Live, Deep Think), three strengths (Google integration, long context, multimodal), pricing, and the difference from ChatGPT and Claude — all with May 2026 info.

In April 2026, the MMMU-Pro multimodal benchmark hit 81–83% across GPT-5.5, Claude Opus 4.7, Gemini 3.1 Pro, and Qwen 3.5 Omni — image understanding has effectively saturated. Architecture has migrated from stitched (separate encoders + adapter) to native omnimodal (all modalities as a shared token stream). This article covers what multimodal AI is (LMM/VLM/Omnimodal), the architectural divide and why it matters, head-to-head comparison of GPT-5.5 / Claude / Gemini / Qwen / DeepSeek, four benchmarks to watch (MMMU-Pro, Video-MMMU, DocVQA, AudioBench), five use-case decisions, and the three hard limits (low-quality image guesses, mid-video accuracy, dialect/jargon audio) — grounded in current research and practical use.

Ever asked a generative AI a question only to hear "that's beyond my knowledge"? Every generative AI has a training data deadline called a knowledge cutoff. Here's a side-by-side comparison of cutoff dates and web search support across 8 major tools.