Wednesday, February 5, 2025

Google’s ‘most capable’ AI model is now available to everyone

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Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai at the New York Times DealBook Summit at Jazz at Lincoln Center on December 4, 2024 in New York City.
Photo: Michael M. Santiago (Getty Images)

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The tech giant said on Wednesday that users of its Gemini app can now try the 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental AI model — which ranks as the best model in the world on the community-driven Chatbot Arena.

Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental is trained to “strengthen its reasoning capabilities” by breaking down prompts step-by-step and showing users its “thought process” to understand how it came to its response. Through this process, users can see “what its assumptions were, and trace the model’s line of reasoning,” Google (GOOGL-7.53%) said.

The company also released a version of 2.0 Flash Thinking that can work with other Google apps such as YouTube and Maps. Advanced subscribers to Gemini get priority access to the 2.0 suite of AI models, including an experimental version of Gemini 2.0 Pro starting on Wednesday. The Pro model is also available in AI Studio and Google’s Vertex AI platform.

In December, the tech giant introduced Gemini 2.0, which “will enable us to build new AI agents that bring us closer to our vision of a universal assistant,” Google chief executive Sundar Pichai said. AI agents are software that can complete complex tasks autonomously for a user.

Developers and testers were the first to get 2.0, while all Gemini users were given access to the Gemini 2.0 Flash experimental model. The Flash model was built off of Gemini 1.5 Flash, which Google launched in July as its fastest, most cost-efficient model.

Google’s new FlashLite model, which it also announced on Wednesday, is an improved version of 1.5 Flash but is priced similarly.

Meanwhile, Google parent company Alphabet missed Wall Street’s expectations for the fourth quarter despite “robust momentum across the business.” Alphabet reported revenue of $96.5 billion for the fourth quarter — a 12% increase year over year. The company also reported earnings of $2.15 per share — up 31% from the previous year, and net income of $26.5 billion for the quarter ended in December.

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