Is Google Gemini Capable of Planning?

Rafe Brena, Ph.D.
6 min readDec 13, 2023

It’s mostly a matter of degree.

Photo by Estée Janssens on Unsplash

In just a few days since the public launch of Gemini, Google’s new AI platform (or rather, family of platforms, because there are three flavors, more on this below), much has been said about it, from “ChatGPT killer” to “No innovation there.”

Many of those headlines sound outrageous on purpose because they are intended to get eyeballs.

But we wonder, is there real meat in Gemini, or is it just a desperate PR stunt trying to present Google as a “cutting-edge” company?

I made some experiments myself, keeping one specific aspect of Gemini in mind: its planning capabilities.

There are many other aspects of Gemini that I haven’t tested so far, like its multimodal capabilities. But planning is essential for reasons I explain in the following.

Planning in AI

What has been discussed in the last year is why conversational AI systems like ChatGPT or Bard have had so much trouble when it comes to planning sequences of steps to achieve a desired state.

I’m not talking here about planning in AI in general because, in traditional AI (not deep-learning LLMs), much progress has been made since many years ago.

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Rafe Brena, Ph.D.

AI expert, mentor, researcher, writer, futurologist. Uncovering the real meaning and human implications of tech endeavors.