Although it was already discovered by intrepid AI power users weeks ago, Google’s new Gemini Omni model officially debuted today at the company’s annual I/O developer conference in Mountain View, California, and it marks a significantly new paradigm in the wider AI and tech marketplace.That’s because as its “omni” (from the Latin omne — meaning “all”) prefix would suggest, this is Google’s first truly native, multimodal model, that is “a model that can create anything from any input — starting with video.” The model marks Google’s bid to collapse the multimodal generative stack — text-to-image, image-to-video, video-to-video, audio generation — into a single foundation model with a single editing surface. The big question for business leaders is: should you switch any of your own AI stack over to Gemini Omni now?Unfortunately, the truth is, you may not be able to just yet — the model is only available to individual users through Google’s AI subscription plans starting with the $20 per user per month “AI Plus” plan. It can currently be accessed on the Gemini website and mobile apps, Google’s web-based Flow AI image and video editing suite, and YouTube Shorts. While the company says it is ultimately going to be available via an application programming interface (API) — which many enterprises rely on for their AI needs — it’s not ready yet. In a departure, Google also did not issue any public benchmarks for Gemini Omni (yet). However, third-party organizations will no doubt put it to the test on various tasks and user-reported quality metrics. In the meantime, though, its quality and speed remain somewhat subjective. But, given the capabilities and faster editing enabled by the new Omni model, individual members of your team should probably give serious consideration to switching over to it, especially if they work creating visuals for technical diagrams, marketing and comms materials, training and corporate education courses, sales collateral, and basically anything that involves visuals. What Omni actually i …
