Month: February 2024

Enlarge (credit: Google)

On Thursday, Google announced that its ChatGPT-like AI assistant, previously called Bard, is now called "Gemini," renamed to reflect the underlying AI language model Google launched in December. Additionally, Google has launched its most capable AI model, Ultra 1.0, for the first time as part of "Gemini Advanced," a $20/month subscription feature.

Untangling Google's naming scheme and how to access the new model is somewhat confusing. To tease out the nomenclature, think of an AI app like Google Bard as a car brand that can swap out different engines under the hood. It's an AI assistant—an application of an AI model with a convenient interface—that can use different AI "engines" to work.

When Bard first launched in March 2023, it used a large language model called LaMDA as its engine. In May 2023, Google upgraded Bard to utilize its PaLM 2 language model. In December, Google upgraded Bard yet again to use its Gemini Pro AI model. It's important to note that when Google first announced Gemini (the AI model), the company said it would ship in three sizes that roughly reflected its processing capability: Nano, Pro, and Ultra (with larger being "better"). Until now, Pro was the most capable version of the Gemini model publicly available.

Enlarge / Blasting taking place at the fossil-rich site. (credit: Bureau of Land Management)

Blasting has begun in an area known as “Community Pit #1” near Las Cruces, New Mexico, as part of a three-year effort by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to level dangerous high walls left in a once heavily mined pit (among other work). But the site is the only known location of certain fossils in the entire state, and some experts question whether the BLM is doing all that it can to balance maintaining public safety and preserving the fossils it is tasked with protecting.

In the Pit

The Community Pit is an area of approximately 85 acres near Prehistoric Trackways National Monument, which hosts a large range of vertebrate footprints. It became a source of building material in 1969, but this use ended in 2007. Scars from several decades of mining remain in the form of very high, very unstable rock walls. Current remediation efforts started because the “BLM observed an increase of visitors climbing upon and underneath undercuts and high walls,” explained William Wight, the BLM Las Cruces District spokesperson. “Due to increased reporting of this dangerous situation in late 2022, the BLM Las Cruces District Office made the Community Pit #1 public health and safety project a top district priority.”

The scope of that project involves “blasting, recontouring, seeding, and re-establishment of vegetation” in about 50 acres of the Community Pit. Blasting will largely impact the top layer of sediment making up the 150-foot walls. It is the rock layer lower in the pit—a geologic formation known as the Robledo Mountain Formation—that contains the fossils unique to the Community Pit: resting and burrowing traces made by jellyfish and horseshoe crabs from the Early Permian (approximately 290 million years or so ago). This is the only known location of jellyfish and horseshoe crab traces in New Mexico.