How to Switch from ChatGPT to Gemini (Without Losing Anything!)

So if you're watching this video, your mind is already thinking about switching from ChatGPT or another LLM to Google's Gemini. But a lot of people are hesitant because not every feature transfers one-to-one. So we went through the most essential ones and thought about how to best transfer your data from one into the other. If you're looking for a clean solution where every chat comes over and everything that you're used to inside of ChatGPT just comes to Gemini, that won't be possible. But I'll be showing you some best practices on how to bring your context projects, GPTs over from ChatGPT to Gemini. So most of this video is going to be about transferring your context that you built up over time from ChatGPT to Gemini. Now that lives in various places. Some of it lives in your account through custom instructions or memories, or it might live inside of your projects or GPTs. Let's start at looking at the account level context that you want to bring over. Now this might vary depending on how you use ChatGPT, but most people will either have something inside of their custom instructions here, which would be this field or one of these three fields. Or most likely, even if you're not aware of it, you'll have some memories built up, which is what customizes ChatGPT. Those are the little snippets that change the answers so that they're customized to who you are. So how do we bring this over? It's actually quite simple. It might be a little tedious, but it's worth it if you want to switch over. You will want to copy everything in these four fields. So for example, you know, This is the most basic one. My nickname is Igor. Then I will go over to Gemini here on a free account. I will navigate to settings and then up here, instructions for Gemini. Under instructions for Gemini, I can say add, and then I can say name is Igor and submit. And this way I would go ahead and copy everything I have in the other fields. I used to have more in here, but by now I manage my contacts through projects, which we'll get to in a second. Simply repeat the process for these 4 fields and then move to memories. You can expose your memories by clicking Manage. And right here, you will see all of them. I wish there was a better way of exporting all of this and bringing it in. But at the end of the day, the best thing you can do here is actually read through these. If any of them don't happen to be factual, you would delete them. So for example, if I want to delete this one memory, make sure to do it now so it doesn't carry over to your new chat. And then once you're done, you have two options. You can either go one by one and copy them over, which there is a benefit to that. Gemini contextualizes it as a separate piece of information rather than clumps it together as one piece of information that always sticks together. This way you'll bring over memories one piece at a time, and there will be no relation between them and the other pieces of instructions that you add here. The other alternative would be selecting all of this, pressing Command+C on Mac, Control+C on Windows, or you just right-click and say copy, and then saving them inside of new instructions for Gemini. That way you brought over all your custom instructions and your memories to your new account, and every chat that you start will be informed by these. I personally would recommend bringing them over one by one unless they relate to each other. Okay, commercial break, cut. And hey, if you're enjoying this tutorial, make sure to subscribe. We make a lot of these on the iAdvantage channel. And now let's get back to the tutorial. Next up, we have to talk about bringing over projects and GPTs into Gemini. Now, there's one major problem, and this might be a reason some of you clicked the video. And unfortunately, I have bad news. There's no equivalence to projects inside of Gemini. You can do a little workaround where you use a feature in there that is equivalent of the GPT feature. Now, if you're completely confused, let me just take 10 seconds to explain what's going on here. All these are is different ways to freeze context in time so that you don't have to reiterate yourself every time you want something new. So if my name is Igor Pogany and I have details about a project that I'm working on, I can take all of those details and save them inside of a project as context. And then every new chat that I start within that project will have that context. I don't have to restart the conversation every time. But as opposed to what we just did now, it's not account-wide. It's just within that project. The same thing goes for GPTs. When I have the information on me and I save it inside of the GPT, only when I'm inside of the GPT, you can also think about it as a chatbot, will that context be used? Now let's talk about the Gemini side of things and how this transfers because in Gemini you only have one feature. It's essentially equivalent to the GPTs in ChatGPT and they're called Gems. Now they do bring some upsides but essentially you'll have to use Gems to bring over both projects and GPTs into Google's Gemini. Now let me just start with GPTs because that is so straightforward that it barely needs explainer video. Look at these, interfaces are pretty much identical. And again, it will just be copy pasting. On the right side, I have ChatGPT where I copy the name and then paste it into the name inside of my Gemini gem. Description, I can leave out. Instructions, you can bring them over one to one. I really like this enhanced instructions feature here in a gem, which you can use once you bring things over. That's totally optional. It's just a nice way to flesh out the instructions if you didn't write them in great detail. And then here we get to the differences. Gems don't offer conversation starters. But if you want, what you can do is you can go to the bottom of the instructions and you could tell it how to start a conversation. Now, it's not exactly the same thing as conversation starters are sort of an opening prompt. And this is more of an instruction on how the gem will interact with you. But in practice, you can often replicate the behavior that you expect from conversation starters with a little instructions block like this at the bottom. Again, optional. Now, here's the part that I really like about gems. You can select one default tool as opposed to the various capabilities that you would activate here in ChatGPT. And I actually think this is superior because it makes the gem even more focused. And some of these capabilities just go beyond what you can do in ChatGPT. This is one of the reasons to actually switch over. You can create music, you can run deep researches right in there and more. So in this case, this is a simple gem that helps me with grammar correction. In that case, I would want to enable the canvas feature. I don't really need anything else here. And finally, if you have any attached files in the knowledge area, then you would attach them here to the gem. This is where you could use probably the most powerful feature inside of a gem. And that is linking a Google Doc. I created a separate tutorial just on that. But basically, you can have a dynamic Google Doc where multiple people collaborate, add information, and your gem auto-updates with anything that is written in that document. And then lastly, you have these actions down here. But honestly, after 2 years of experimenting with these and knowing a lot of people that are true power users of AI, nobody uses actions. The idea is right, but the implementation here within ChatGPT just isn't. And that's it. That's how you bring over the gem. You just click save and now you brought over your GPT into Gemini. Now where it starts getting a bit trickier is if you want to bring projects over. You might know that I myself am a strong proponent of projects and they updated the interface here in ChatGPT. So now it looks like this. You have chats over here and sources over here. I believe sooner or later Google will implement this feature too, but as of now you're limited to replicating what the project does with a gem. There's one big downside, and that is that your conversations will not be grouped within the project folder. But other than that, you can pretty much bring everything over because all projects are, are simplified gems that organize your conversations. You lose the ability to organize conversations. But when it comes to bringing the files over, you would go into your project, download the files like I did right there, and then you would simply re-upload them here in the Knowledge tab under Upload Files. And then I select the file that I just downloaded. From my ChatGPT project. If you have project-level instructions, you can access those with the three dots, then go to project settings. And here I would select all of the instructions, copy, and then paste them here inside of the instructions field. And then lastly, I could give it the same name, AIA work context. And that's how you would bring a project over. Now again, you're going to lose the ability to group the chats by project, but that is the trade-off you're making here. And that is how to bring over all of the context. That is the core of what makes your account unique outside of one thing. Which is the chats. You probably built up a library of various chats that you might want to return to sometimes. And in short, the bad news is that there's no clean way to export all of your chats and bring them in. Now, that being said, depending on which ChatGPT plan you are on, you can archive all of your chats and make sure they don't get lost. So you don't need to access your account anymore. So you can do this on a Plus account and a Pro account. I believe also Academic and Enterprise has this. The one account that absolutely forbids chats exports, which is weird and I'm not exactly sure what the reasoning there was. But if you're in a ChatGPT Teams account, you won't even be able to export your chats. On any other account, you simply click your profile here on the bottom left, you go to your settings, you go to data controls, and here you click this export data button. And within 24 hours, you will receive an export of all of your data, which basically archives all of your chats and context, even the ones within the projects. But unfortunately, there's no clean way to import this into Gemini where they would just appear as new chats. Which does make sense. I mean, there's a lot of tools and code and previews and other specific input methods like advanced voice that happen inside of chats that cannot be replicated here. So it wouldn't make sense to import them. But let me tell you, as somebody who's been using all of these tools and flip-flopping between them, my recommendation would be take the chats that you revisit regularly, if there is some of those, and just copy-paste the entire context and bring them over. So this is just an example. But here I had a chat about navigating different time zones between LA and Phoenix and Portugal. If this was important to me, it's as simple as copying all of this. Again, I say simple, not easy, as selecting all of it, hitting copy, and then inside of Gemini saying, this is context from a previous conversation. And then pasting all of it in. And now you can continue your conversation here with all the benefits that Gemini brings, like the unique tooling between Nanobanana and the music creation ability, like the superior deep research, or the unique flavor of their models that some prefer. I know that this can be a little disappointing, but unfortunately, after digging thinking this is the only way to do it. And at the end of the day, I would encourage you to build your context in a transferable way anyway. So what we copy-pasted in the beginning, if you want to become a bit more advanced, I would recommend saving that instead of a text file, or even better, a markdown file, as I have. And then you can easily bring over that context from ChatGPT to Gemini to Claude or wherever you decide to go in the future without having to copy-paste a bunch of files. And also, if you want to use multiple services at the same time, it makes it really easy. You just have these files that you upload to a gem or to a chat or wherever you want, and instantly you brought in all the context that matters and you can get to work right away rather than worrying about does this service have the right information now? No, you have your file and you know the info is there. That's the easiest workflow no matter what updates they ship. All right, I hope that was helpful. My name is Igor Pogany and I will see you very soon.