Google releases the first of its Gemini 2.0 AI models

Google released the first version of its Gemini 2.0 family of artificial intelligence models on Wednesday.

Gemini 2.0 Flash, as the model is called, is available in a chat version for users globally while an experimental multimodal version of the model, with text-to-speech and image generation features, is available to developers. 

“If Gemini 1.0 was about organizing and understanding information, Gemini 2.0 is about making it much more useful,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in a statement.

Google’s latest large language model outperforms its predecessors in the majority of user request areas, such as code generation and the ability to provide factually correct responses from user requests. One area where it is inferior to Gemini 1.5 Pro is when it comes to evaluating longer contexts. 

To access the chat-optimized version of the experimental Flash 2.0, Gemini users can select it in the model drop-down menu on desktop and mobile web. It will be available on the Gemini mobile app soon, the company said.

The multimodal version of Gemini Flash 2.0 will be available via the Google’s AI Studio and Vertex AI developer platforms.

General availability of Gemini 2.0 Flash’s multimodal version will come in January, along with more Gemini 2.0 model sizes, Google said Wednesday. The company said it also plans to expand Gemini 2.0 to more Google products in early 2025. 

Gemini 2.0 represents Google’s latest efforts in the tech industry’s increasingly competitive AI race. Google is competing against the likes of rivals like tech giants Microsoft and Meta and startups like OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, Perplexity and Anthropic, which makes Claude. 

Along with the release of the new Flash model are other research prototypes aimed at developing more “agentic” AI models and experiences. Agentic models, according to the company, “can understand more about the world around you, think multiple steps ahead, and take action on your behalf, with your supervision.”

Last week, in a conversation with Andrew Ross Sorkin at The New York Times’ DealBook Summit, Pichai challenged Microsoft’s AI advancement, saying he’d “love to do a side-by-side comparison” of the two companies’ models “any day, any time.”

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