  The surge of interest towards Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs),
e.g., GPT-4V(ision) from OpenAI, has marked a significant trend in both
academia and industry. They endow Large Language Models (LLMs) with powerful
capabilities in visual understanding, enabling them to tackle diverse
multi-modal tasks. Very recently, Google released Gemini, its newest and most
capable MLLM built from the ground up for multi-modality. In light of the
superior reasoning capabilities, can Gemini challenge GPT-4V's leading position
in multi-modal learning? In this paper, we present a preliminary exploration of
Gemini Pro's visual understanding proficiency, which comprehensively covers
four domains: fundamental perception, advanced cognition, challenging vision
tasks, and various expert capacities. We compare Gemini Pro with the
state-of-the-art GPT-4V to evaluate its upper limits, along with the latest
open-sourced MLLM, Sphinx, which reveals the gap between manual efforts and
black-box systems. The qualitative samples indicate that, while GPT-4V and
Gemini showcase different answering styles and preferences, they can exhibit
comparable visual reasoning capabilities, and Sphinx still trails behind them
concerning domain generalizability. Specifically, GPT-4V tends to elaborate
detailed explanations and intermediate steps, and Gemini prefers to output a
direct and concise answer. The quantitative evaluation on the popular MME
benchmark also demonstrates the potential of Gemini to be a strong challenger
to GPT-4V. Our early investigation of Gemini also observes some common issues
of MLLMs, indicating that there still remains a considerable distance towards
artificial general intelligence. Our project for tracking the progress of MLLM
is released at
https://github.com/BradyFU/Awesome-Multimodal-Large-Language-Models.
