Google's Gemini API and AI Studio get grounding with Google Search
Starting today, developers using Google's Gemini API and its Google AI Studio to build AI-based services and bots will be able to ground their prompts'
Starting today, developers using Google’s Gemini API and its Google AI Studio to build AI-based services and bots will be able to ground their prompts’ results with data from Google Search. This should enable more accurate responses based on fresher data.
As has been the case before, developers will be able to try out grounding for free in AI Studio, which is essentially Google’s playground for developers to test and refine their prompts, and access its latest large language models. Gemini API users will have to be on the paid tier and will pay $35 per 1,000 grounded queries.
AI Studio’s recently launched built-in compare mode makes it easy to see how the results of grounded queries differ from those that rely solely on the model’s own data.
Turning on grounding is as easy as toggling on a switch and deciding on how often the API should use grounding by making changes to the so-called ‘dynamic retrieval’ setting. That could be as straightforward as opting to turn it on for every prompt or going with a more nuanced setting that then uses a smaller model to evaluate the prompt and decide whether it would benefit from being augmented with data from Google Search.
“Grounding can help […] when you ask a very recent question that’s beyond the model’s knowledge cut off, but it could also help with a question which is not as recent, […] but you may want richer detail,” Shrestha Basu Mallick, Google’s group product manager for the Gemini API and AI Studio, explained. “There might be developers who say we only want to ground on recent facts, and they would set this [dynamic retrieval value] higher. And there might be developers who say: No, I want the rich detail of Google search on everything.”
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