Gemini 1.5 Pro vs ChatGPT 4o: Choosing the right model
- What is Gemini 1.5 Pro?
- What is ChatGPT-4o?
- Gemini 1.5 Pro vs ChatGPT 4o Benchmark Comparison
- Gemini 1.5 Pro and ChatGPT 4o Cost Comparison
- Gemini 1.5 Pro vs ChatGPT 4o Overall Comparison
- Key Differences between Gemini 1.5 Pro and GPT-4o
- Choosing Between Gemini 1.5 Pro and GPT-4o
OpenAI and Google have been releasing better and better frontier large language models (LLMs) in 2024. The newest versions of both are Google's Gemini 1.5 Pro and OpenAI's GPT-4o.
While both models are advanced in handling complex, multimodal tasks, they diverge in their focus on context windows, speed, and versatility.
Gemini 1.5 Pro focuses on balancing high-performance multimodal capabilities with a gigantic context window and GPT-4o excels with multimodal tasks and best in class reasoning and speed.
We'll explore both models in depth to help you determine which one best suits your particular requirements.
What is Gemini 1.5 Pro?
Gemini 1.5 Pro, introduced in February 2024, is a mid-sized multimodal model within Google's Gemini AI family, optimized for a wide range of tasks.
It offers significant enhancements over its predecessors, including:
- Expanded Context Window: Capable of processing up to 1 million tokens, enabling the handling of extensive and complex inputs.
- Multimodal Processing: Proficient in analyzing diverse data types, including text, images, audio, and video, facilitating comprehensive understanding and reasoning across various formats.
- Improved Efficiency: Optimized for lower latency and cost, making it suitable for applications requiring rapid responses and scalability.
Gemini 1.5 Pro is accessible through Google AI Studio and the Gemini API, providing developers with a powerful tool for integrating advanced AI capabilities into their applications. Google AI Studio usage is completely free in all available countries.
What is ChatGPT-4o?
GPT-4o (“o” for “omni”), launched on May 13, 2024, is an updated version of OpenAI’s GPT-4 model. It is designed with enhancements to both efficiency and accessibility.
With a 128,000-token context window for longer conversations, GPT-4o’s biggest improvement is the ability to process multiple data types—including text, audio, images, and video—within the model. It also boasts faster response times, cheaper cost per token, and lower latency, making it a prime candidate for real-time applications, multilingual tasks, and high volume jobs.
GPT-4o is also available through the ChatGPT user interface and via OpenAI’s API for developers.
Gemini 1.5 Pro vs ChatGPT 4o Benchmark Comparison
As of November 8, 2024, here is a benchmark comparison between Google's Gemini 1.5 Pro and OpenAI's GPT-4o across various tasks:
| Benchmark | Description | Gemini 1.5 Pro | GPT-4o |
|---|---|---|---|
| MMLU | Evaluates knowledge across 57 subjects. | 81.9% (5-shot) | 88.7% |
| Natural2Code | Python code generation on a held-out dataset. | 82.6% | 90.2% |
| MATH | Challenging math problems, including algebra. | 67.7% | 76.6% |
| GPQA (main) | Questions in biology, physics, and chemistry. | 41.5% | 53.6% |
| Big-Bench Hard | Diverse set of challenging tasks requiring reasoning. | 84.0% | 90.0% |
| WMT23 | Language translation. | 75.2 | 79.8 |
| MMMU | Multi-discipline college-level reasoning problems. | 58.5% | 69.1% |
| MathVista | Mathematical reasoning in visual contexts. | 52.1% | 60.3% |
| FLEURS (55 langs) | Automatic speech recognition (word error rate; lower is better). | 6.6 | 5.4 |
| EgoSchema | Video question answering. | 63.2% | 70.1% |
Benchmark breakdown:
GPT-4o generally outperforms Gemini 1.5 Pro. This is consistent across most benchmarks listed, including MMLU (general knowledge), Natural2Code (code generation), MATH, GPQA (science questions), Big-Bench Hard (reasoning), WMT23 (translation), MMMU (multi-discipline reasoning), MathVista (visual math), and EgoSchema (video understanding).
Gemini 1.5 Pro shows strength in certain areas. While generally behind GPT-4o, Gemini 1.5 Pro demonstrates competitive performance in certain tasks, particularly in the Big-Bench Hard benchmark, which evaluates reasoning abilities.
The FLEURS benchmark is an exception. In this automatic speech recognition task, Gemini 1.5 Pro achieves a lower word error rate, indicating better performance than GPT-4o.
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Gemini 1.5 Pro and ChatGPT 4o Cost Comparison
| Model | Input Pricing (per 1M tokens) | Output Pricing (per 1M tokens) |
|---|---|---|
| Gemini 1.5 Pro | $1.25 (up to 128k tokens) | $5.00 (up to 128k tokens) |
| $2.50 (over 128k tokens) | $10.00 (over 128k tokens) | |
| GPT-4o | $2.50 | $10.00 |
Note: Usage in Google AI studio is free for testing purposes and usage in ChatGPT is not token based.
GPT-4o comes with a higher price tag, reflecting its advanced performance capabilities across complex tasks. For users who prioritize top-tier performance, GPT-4o’s consistent pricing structure ensures predictability, making it an ideal choice for high-demand projects.
Gemini 1.5 Pro provides a more affordable entry into high-performance AI with tiered pricing that allows flexibility based on prompt length. This model strikes a balance between cost and capability, appealing to projects that benefit from advanced functionality without the premium pricing of GPT-4o.
Gemini 1.5 Pro vs ChatGPT 4o Overall Comparison
| Category | Gemini 1.5 Pro | GPT-4o |
|---|---|---|
| Model Description | A large multimodal model for complex tasks, including reasoning and creative tasks. | Optimized successor to GPT-4; cost-effective, efficient, and versatile for a wide range of applications. |
| Multimodality | Strong multimodal capabilities across text, code, images, video, and audio. | Supports text, image, audio, and video inputs with text, image, and audio outputs, optimized for efficiency. |
| Context Window | 1 million tokens | 128,000 tokens |
| Strengths | - Excels in complex reasoning, creative writing, and coding. - Strong instruction-following and nuanced interpretation. - High accuracy across various tasks. | - Superior in broad language understanding, multilingual tasks, and multimodal comprehension, especially vision and audio tasks. - Highly efficient for real-time translation. |
| Weaknesses | - May be slower and less cost-effective than Gemini 1.5 Flash for extensive contexts. | - Lacks GPT-4’s in-depth reasoning chain; quicker responses but potentially less detailed than GPT-4. |
| Speed | Fast but generally slower than Gemini 1.5 Flash with very long contexts. | Generates text up to 2x faster than GPT-4, optimized for low latency and high efficiency. |
| Cost | >50% price reduction as of October 2024; more expensive than Flash but reduced for complex tasks. | $2.50 / 1M input tokens; $10.00 / 1M output tokens—very cost-effective. |
| Specializations | - Complex reasoning, nuanced instruction, creative tasks. - Strong performance in coding and handling multimodal content. | - Multilingual tasks, vision-based capabilities, and highly efficient language understanding. |
| Training Data | Up to October 2023, leveraging high-quality, diverse multimodal data. | Up to October 2023, fine-tuned for various languages and multimodal tasks. |
| Ideal Use Cases | - Tasks needing high-level reasoning, creative content, and multimodal understanding. - Suitable for applications in code generation and nuanced task interpretation. | - Applications that require speed, efficiency, multilingual capabilities, and real-time response. |
| Fine-tuning | Can be fine-tuned. | Can be fine-tuned. |
| Availability | Available to API users and Google AI Studio users | Available to API users and ChatGPT users |
Key Differences between Gemini 1.5 Pro and GPT-4o
Performance: GPT-4o beats Gemini 1.5 Prop in complex tasks requiring deep reasoning and nuance understanding. While Gemini 1.5 Pro is optimized for much longer context windows.
Cost: Gemini 1.5 Pro is more cost-effective when inputs are less than 128k tokens. For inputs more than 128k tokens the models are the same.
Context Window: Gemini 1.5 Pro supports an extensive 1 million token context window, making it ideal for handling large, complex inputs seamlessly. In contrast, GPT-4o is optimized for efficiency but offers a smaller 128,000 token context window, which is sufficient for most standard applications but less suited for extremely long inputs.
Choosing Between Gemini 1.5 Pro and GPT-4o
Both Gemini 1.5 Pro and ChatGPT-4o offer unique strengths. Here’s a breakdown to help you decide which model may be the best fit for your needs:
Cost and Efficiency: Gemini 1.5 Pro offers a tiered pricing structure that is more affordable for smaller inputs (under 128k tokens). It becomes equivalent in cost to GPT-4o when handling inputs beyond 128k tokens.
For projects requiring extended context or multimodal inputs across vast data sets, Pro’s pricing flexibility can be advantageous. GPT-4o, however, maintains a predictable and consistent cost, making it a straightforward choice for high-demand tasks that prioritize efficiency.
Context Window: With a 1 million token context window, Gemini 1.5 Pro is well-suited to applications needing to process lengthy documents, intricate inputs, or complex conversational threads.
GPT-4o, with a 128,000 token limit, is optimized for speed and standard usage but may truncate inputs that exceed this threshold.
Performance and Strengths: For intricate reasoning and creative tasks, Gemini 1.5 Pro demonstrates strong capabilities, particularly in contexts where nuanced understanding and multimodal inputs are necessary.
GPT-4o, while adept at handling multimodal inputs, stands out in all categories of reasoning, speed and cost efficiency, performing exceptionally well in real-time applications, multilingual translations, and high-volume tasks where quick response times are essential.
Specialization: Gemini 1.5 Pro's expansive context window and multimodal depth allow it to interpret and respond to more nuanced and lengthy prompts effectively. In contrast, GPT-4o’s strength lies complex comprehension, efficient handling of multimodal tasks, and fast response times making it a strong choice for applications that prioritize speed and reasoning.
When to Choose Gemini 1.5 Pro
- Long-Context Applications: If your application involves extensive documents or complex, layered inputs, Pro’s 1 million token capacity supports uninterrupted processing.
When to Choose GPT-4o
- Real-Time Applications: GPT-4o’s speed, reasoning, and efficiency make it well-suited for chatbots, live translations, and interactive content where response times are critical.
- Standard Context Tasks: For projects that do not require extensive input length, GPT-4o’s 128,000 token limit is ample and highly efficient.
Both models offer advanced capabilities in AI, and your choice depends on the balance between context requirements, performance needs, and budget constraints.
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