San Francisco, Dec 4 (IANS): Google has delayed the launch of Gemini, a conversational artificial intelligence that aims to compete with OpenAI, to next year in January, media report said.

According to The Information, citing sources, a series of Gemini events scheduled for next week in California, New York and Washington has been cancelled by Google CEO Sundar Pichai after the company found that the AI didn't reliably handle some non-English queries.

The upcoming events, which were not publicly announced, would have marked Google's most important product launch of the year, after it strained its computing resources and merged large teams to pursue OpenAI urgently, the report noted.

Gemini is designed to handle a wide range of applications, merging various sorts of data such as images and text for more advanced tasks.

In June, Google's DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said that Gemini would be more capable than OpenAI's ChatGPT.

Hassabis mentioned the engineers are using techniques from the AI programme AlphaGo -- which was the first to defeat a champion human player of the board game Go -- to make Gemini. Gemini is likely to bring improvements to Google's existing AI and AI-enhanced products too, like Bard, Google Assistant and Search.

This new AI system was first teased at Google's developer conference in May when the company announced the new AI projects.