Yes, Gemini and previously Bard has a lot of confusion about its own capabilities. I use it to translate Chinese text in aliexpress product listings by taking screenshots. It’s perfectly capable and quite helpful in translating the text from those screenshots, but I think depending on how you phrase the question while uploading the photo, it will sometimes say “I’m only a language model I can’t help with that” or even “I can’t help with images”. Once it says that, I think it poisons the chat history and I start a new session to try to get it to work. I’ve not translated many images but so far this error happens maybe 20% of the time. It’s very strange.

I have another issue which is that when I paste a C++ code file in to the web interface, I get an error from the web interface and Gemini never even sees the code. The web interface is refusing to accept my code file. I opened up AI studio instead of the normal Gemini window and that seems to work, but I’d rather just use the normal chat window.

It’s all statistics. In the training set, there were probably questions asking about its capabilities and it was trained to say it has less than it does. (Or it’s a bad system prompt)

There’s no internal understanding of itself or its capabilities.