For more than a year, Google has been developing technology that could rival ChatGPT, the sensational chatbot offered by San Francisco artificial intelligence startup OpenAI.

On Wednesday, the tech giant took another step in the ongoing race and released a new version of its own chatbot, Google Bard. The updated bot is available immediately to English speakers in more than 170 territories and countries, including the United States, and is powered by new AI technology called Gemini, which the company has been developing since the beginning of the year.

“This is the beginning of the Gemini era,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in an interview. “It’s the realization of the vision we had when we founded Google DeepMind,” the company’s AI lab. He said Google will implement three different versions of the technology across a wide range of products and services in the coming months.

Mr Pichai and Demis Hassabis, who oversee Google DeepMind, said Gemini is more powerful than Google’s previous chatbot technologies, and could generate more accurate responses and come closer to mimicking human reasoning in some situations.

“We are thrilled with Gemini’s performance,” said Dr. Hassabis.

When OpenAI amazed the world late last year with the AI ​​chatbot ChatGPT, Google was caught flat-footed. The tech giant had been developing similar technology for years, but like other tech giants – most notably Meta – was reluctant to release a technology that could generate biased, false or otherwise toxic information.

In March, Google released its own chatbot, Bard, to mediocre reviews. A month later, the company announced that it had merged its two AI labs – Google Brain and DeepMind – bringing together more than 2,000 researchers and engineers. And in May, the company announced at its flagship Google I/O conference that the new Google DeepMind lab had begun developing Gemini.

After founding the Brain lab in 2011, Google acquired DeepMind in 2014 and paid $650 million for the London AI start-up. DeepMind operated largely independently of the Brain Lab and the rest of Google for a decade, even attempting to exit the company in 2017. But as Google struggled to catch up with OpenAI, Mr. Pichai combined the two labs under Dr. Hassabis, a neuroscientist who co-founded DeepMind.

Google has released benchmark test results claiming that the most powerful version of Gemini outperforms OpenAI’s latest technology, GPT-4, in several key areas. It is better at generating computer code than previous Google technologies, Mr. Pichai said, and it can summarize news articles and other text documents more accurately.

Gemini is also designed to analyze images and sounds, but those skills won’t be rolled into the Bard chatbot until a later date.

Google built three versions of Gemini with three different skills. The largest, Ultra, is designed to tackle complex tasks and will debut next year. Pro, the mid-tier offering, will roll out to numerous Google services with the Bard chatbot starting Wednesday. Nano, the smallest version, will power a number of features on the Pixel 8 Pro smartphone from Wednesday, such as summarizing audio recordings and offering suggested text responses in WhatsApp.

Gemini is what scientists call a large language model, or LLM, a complex mathematical system that can learn skills by analyzing vast amounts of data, including digital books, Wikipedia articles and online bulletin boards. By identifying patterns in all that text, an LLM learns to generate text itself. That means it can write theses, generate computer code and even hold a conversation.

With Gemini, Google has also trained the technology on digital images and sounds. It’s what researchers call a “multimodal” system, meaning it can analyze and respond to both images and sounds. If you give him a math problem that includes lines, shapes, and other images, for example, he may answer in much the same way as a high school student.

However, that part of the technology won’t be available to consumers until sometime next year. Google also acknowledged that Gemini, like similar systems, is prone to errors. It can misrepresent facts or even ‘hallucinate’ – make things up.

Google Cloud, which offers AI and computing services to other companies, is eager to offer Gemini to customers as it competes for deals with OpenAI and Microsoft. After OpenAI briefly forced CEO Sam Altman to leave the company in limbo last month, Google Cloud created a migration plan in an attempt to steal its rival’s customers.

Customers can pay Google the same price as their current OpenAI rate and receive cloud credits or discounts.

Google said cloud customers would have access to Gemini Pro – its mid-tier offering – on December 13. Mr Pichai said some outsiders were now testing Gemini Ultra – the most powerful version of the technology.

Although Google has raced to recapture OpenAI’s AI lead over the past year, Mr Pichai said there was plenty of room in the market for all AI providers.

“It’s far from a zero-sum game,” Mr. Pichai said. “We have a sense of excitement about what we are launching. We also realize that we are still in the very early stages as we can see the continued progress we are making.”

Jairo Lerma and several of his relatives placed a wooden cross in the dry grass along a Texas highway where his parents, en route from Georgia to Mexico, were suddenly killed in a fiery crash with an oncoming car carrying migrants and fleeing was for a deputy sheriff. .

Shortly before the crash on November 8, his mother, Isabel, had texted to say that she and her husband, José Carlos, a retired carpet factory worker from Dalton, Georgia, would soon be at the border. Instead, they died near a bend in the road about 90 kilometers away, along with five migrants and the 21-year-old driver of the other car.

“I blame the police because they chased at a very high speed in a location that was really dangerous,” Mr Lerma said. “This could have been prevented.”

In recent years, police departments in the United States have reassessed when and how to pursue fleeing suspects and adopted policies to limit the number of dangerous high-speed chases.

But in Texas, state police and sheriff’s offices are notable exceptions, say police experts, who retain broad discretion to initiate pursuit when their officers see fit. The approach even differs from that of the state’s large city departments, such as Houston, where police have recently become active pursuits for minor offenses prohibited.

Chases across Texas have spiked starting in 2021, when Gov. Greg Abbott started a program known as Operation Lone Star and sent thousands of state troopers to patrol the area around the border.

The chases, which often erupt suddenly from traffic jams, have left dozens dead and dozens injured, including bystanders, roiling border communities from El Paso to Brownsville.

High-speed pursuits are part of Abbott’s aggressive approach to the surge in migrants arriving at the border, a strategy that has sparked clashes with the Biden administration. The federal government has investigated the actions of Texas police during Operation Lone Star, including their operations in areas where migrants drowned in the Rio Grande, although no broad action has been taken to curtail the program.

In Zavala County, where Mr.’s parents Lerma were murdered, residents have suffered a sharp increase in the number of chases. State police conducted at least 175 vehicle pursuits in Zavala County during the first two years of Operation Lone Star alone, according to department data. In the year before the border enforcement program, there were seven.

“It’s dangerous,” said Paul Rodriguez, who drives a roadside taco truck with his wife on U.S. Highway 57, where many chases have occurred. “It could just come straight to us, or to people buying food.”

The owner of a towing company that regularly does business transporting the wrecked vehicles used by fleeing migrant smugglers said he is advising his family not to drive on Highway 57. The mayor of Crystal City, the largest community in sparsely populated ranch Land County, said he avoids the road altogether after seeing the gnarled remains of chases.

“I have stopped using that highway,” Mayor Frank Moreno Jr. said. in an interview at city hall. “After all those years in the military, I don’t think something like that would happen to me.”

The state’s Department of Public Safety said 29 people were killed in troop pursuits in 2021 and 2022, the first two years of Operation Lone Star, about double the number in the previous two years. The figures do not include pursuits by other law enforcement agencies working with the state on Operation Lone Star, the department said.

a review of media reports by Human Rights Watch suggested that as of July 2023, more than 60 people had been killed in pursuits during Operation Lone Star. A report from the organization was expected on Monday.

The increase in deaths appeared to closely follow a rise in pursuits by state police. In counties along or near the border in South Texas, the number of pursuits has doubled from about 500 in 2019 to 1,100 in 2022. According to department data, there were about four times as many in those counties as in and around major cities like Dallas and Houston.

This year, the federal Customs and Border Protection Agency, whose agents have been involved in a number of deadly pursuits, has imposed new risk assessments and restrictions as part of its pursuit policy.

“It’s evolved quite dramatically,” said Travis Yates, a police trainer and retired major with the Tulsa Police Department. Thirty years ago, most departments pursued anyone who fled, he said. “You’re seeing a trend right now to give officers very strict parameters.”

Yet many departments continue to stick to the old approach of leaving this to the discretion of individual officers.

“State police are typically the biggest opponents of restricting pursuits,” said Geoffrey P. Alpert, a professor of criminology at the University of South Carolina who has long studied police pursuits. “Their job is traffic. That’s what they do. So if someone flees from them, it is an insult.”

He added that Texas State Police are “very aggressive” when it comes to pursuits.

Steven McCraw, the director of the Department of Public Safety, said in a telephone interview that the department relied on its troops to decide when to initiate a pursuit and when to call it off.

The department, he said, also uses a range of other tools to stop fleeing cars, including tracking helicopters overhead, placing “stop sticks” across the road or, if available, attaching a GPS tracker during a stop. (Such devices are mainly used in urban environments, a department official said.)

“I would say you can certainly mitigate the risks,” Mr. McCraw said. But by not pursuing it, he added, “you are only rewarding the Mexican cartels” in their smuggling efforts. He said he expected his troops to conduct the pursuit in a “judicious manner” and that they would be held accountable if they failed to exercise due caution.

“Frankly, I think this is a much better approach than capitulating to the cartels,” he said.

Mr. Abbott has credited Operation Lone Star with thousands of human smuggling arrests, often of U.S. citizens hired to expel migrants from border areas. A new law, which will come into force next year, increases the penalty for smuggling up to at least 10 years.

Many of the drivers are Texans recruited with the promise of quick money, said Sgt. Rogelio Lopez Jr., a deputy with the Zavala County Sheriff’s Office. “A lot of them are teenagers that we’re chasing,” he said in an interview during a recent predawn patrol.

The accident in which the parents of Mr. Lerma died is still under investigation. Chief Deputy Ricardo Rios said the policy of the Zavala County Sheriff’s Office was to rely on a deputy’s discretion, taking into account the location — whether in town or on the highway — and traffic on the road.

In September 2021, Gabriel Salazar, a 19-year-old from San Antonio with a significant following on social media, was killed along with three migrants in a crash while fleeing a traffic stop in Crystal City. A sheriff’s deputy used a tire deflation device before the crash. the department said.

Mr. Salazar was driving a white Chevrolet Camaro, which he had bought a few days earlier with his mother’s help, said his sister, Danna Salazar. “He was so excited when he got it,” she said. The family had tried to file a case against the police, whom they blamed for the crash, but were unable to find a lawyer to represent them, Ms. Salazar said. “He had a lot of goals,” she said of her brother. “He was trying to be a model.”

Zavala County, once an industrial producer of spinach, is not directly on the Rio Grande, but provides a connection between the border town of Eagle Pass and Interstate 35.

During his patrol, Sergeant Lopez pointed out places where migrants waited for a pickup along the highways: an abandoned house, now filled with discarded clothing and backpacks; a hiding place in the brush.

Behind the fences of a farm, an abandoned SUV that had been involved in an accident last year sat in a stand of mesquite trees, near roaring cattle.

“They went from the highway to here,” said Eddie Gomez, a ranch worker. He said migrants still regularly passed through the hunting ranch on foot, cutting the fence and occasionally allowing deer to escape.

According to residents, the number of chases seemed to decrease in recent months. Still, the fear of a sudden pursuit loomed large.

For the annual Spinach Festival in Crystal City — where a painted statue of Popeye from the 1930s stands prominently in front of City Hall — City Manager Felix Benavides said he had lined up police cars for protection in case a fleeing suspect crashed during the celebration.

“As city manager, that is my biggest concern,” Mr. Benavides said. “These are the problems we face in America.”

Aitana Bonmatí always asks the same question. Every game that Barcelona Femení plays generates a deluge of performance data. The team’s fitness coaches know how far each player has run, how fast and how long. In fact, there is so much information that it takes them two days to download, tabulate and parse it. Only then will it be returned to the team.

Not every player pays much attention to that kind of feedback. Some ignore it completely. Bonmati is different. She doesn’t just want the answer; she also wants to see the work. She especially wants to know why.

“After a few games you feel so tired, so exhausted,” she said. “But the data may be low. That’s because sometimes it’s not just physical. It may be related to stress, to the nerves you had. I like to talk about it with the coaches. I want to understand why these things happen.”

In raw numbers, 25-year-old Bonmatí’s season looks like this: scoring nine goals and making ten from midfield as Barcelona won another Spanish title; scored five goals and scored a further seven in the Champions League en route to her – and her club’s – fourth final in five years. Only Wolfsburg’s Ewa Pajor has scored more goals than Bonmatí. No one has more assists.

The case that Bonmatí has ​​been Europe’s most decisive, most valuable player this season is convincing. There is also a strong body of evidence suggesting she should be considered the leading contender for the Ballon d’Or, at least until the World Cup rolls around.

The easiest explanation for why is one that she dismisses without thinking. It is Bonmatí, the theory goes, who has emerged as Barcelona’s heartbeat in the injury-forced absence of the club’s captain Alexia Putellas. “She has taken a huge responsibility in midfield,” said Fridolina Rolfo, Barcelona’s Swedish striker, earlier this year. “She deserves all the attention as far as I’m concerned.”

Bonmatí has ​​a slightly different interpretation. “The coach is the boss,” she said. This season, that coach – Jonatan Giráldez – has asked her to play a more advanced role than in previous years, not only to mitigate Putellas’ absence, but also because the presence of Patri Guijarro, Ingrid Engen and Keira Walsh means that the club is doing well. filled with defensive midfielders. “The role has changed,” said Bonmatí. “But not because of me.”

Replacing Putellas, she said, was a collective effort. “The media is always trying to find someone on the team to focus on, and this year it’s me,” she said. “But I have had good seasons in recent years. I am ambitious. I just want to be better, more complete than last year.”

Getting noticed at Barcelona is more complex than it seems. Lucy Bronze, the England defender who moved to Catalonia last summer, perhaps captured it best. At Barcelona, ​​she said earlier this year, she was surrounded by an almost industrial amount of wonderfully gifted players, all of whom washed off the academy’s production line.

“There are just clones and clones and clones of these amazing, technical, intelligent players,” she said, awestruck and possibly a little scared at the same time. “There are hundreds.”

That Bonmatí has ​​managed to stand out from that group – even at a club carefully calibrated to deliver excellence, and at a squad packed with the world’s best players – can be attributed to her quest for completeness.

Xavi Hernández, the coach of the Barcelona men’s team and Bonmatí’s childhood idol, described her as a “perfectionist” in the prologue of the book she published last year. She puts it differently. “I try to understand everything,” she said. “I am a very curious person.”

Cod psychology would suggest that she inherited that trait from her parents: both academics, both teachers of Catalan literature, both inspired enough by the pursuit of equality that they forced a change in the law to allow Bonmatí to take her mother’s surname, instead of a patronymic followed by a matronymic.

It’s a streak Bonmatí hasn’t lost, and one best illustrated not so much by her continuing education – she’s studying sports management, already aware at the age of 25 of the need to prepare for a life after football – but by her approach to her career itself.

Bonmatí is – in her words – “always doing things.” “Making a schedule is quite complicated,” she said. “I have to make sure I get time for myself, because otherwise I feel like I can’t breathe.” Her teammates, she believes, consider her “hyperactive.”

She has roles, off the field, at the United Nations Refugee Agency, at the Johan Cruyff Foundation, at the Barcelona Foundation. She works with a team for female refugees.

When Walsh and Bronze arrived in Barcelona, ​​Bonmatí immediately volunteered to act as their de facto translator. If they needed anything, she told them, they should just tell her. The gesture was rooted in kindness, but there was also a reward. “It means I can improve my English,” she said. There was no ulterior motive for this – Bonmatí did not hope it would lead to an imminent move to England or the United States. She just wanted to get better at English.

Almost everything Bonmatí does focuses on a process of endless improvement, ironing out flaws and making sure nothing has gone unnoticed. She reads, and she reads a lot: her house, she said, is full of books on nutrition, on performance, on psychology. (Even her downtime isn’t really downtime: The likes of Primo Levi and Viktor Frankl occupy the light reading spot.)

“The more things I know, the more I can apply what I know,” she said. “The smarter I am about those topics, the better it is for my performance.”

Then there’s her kinesthetic learning: away from the Barcelona job but with the club’s blessing, she employs her own fitness coach, nutritionist and psychologist. She also questions them. “I want to know what to improve and how to do it,” she said.

It comes as no surprise, then, that Bonmatí is hardly pleased with Barcelona’s performance to reach the Champions League final again. It is the third in a row and the fourth overall for her and her club. This stage is so familiar that Barcelona will go in as heavy favorites to beat Wolfsburg on Saturday.

That, of course, is an achievement in itself, a testament to how far the Barcelona women’s team has come, of the stature it has achieved, of the progress Bonmatí and her teammates have made. However, that is not what Bonmatí sees when she looks at the data. “We only won one of the finals,” she said. “We’ve lost two. Personally, I want to win more.”