Google took the wraps off its updated Gemini model, Gemini 2.0, and the company pitched the evolution of its large language model as the supportive leap to ‘agentic era’.
In a press release, Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, DeepMind CEO Hassabis, and DeepMind CTO Koray Kavukcuoglu updated developers on the impending release of its Gemini 2.0 artificial intelligence model. Gemini 2.0 will unsurprisingly power most of Google’s platforms and services in 2025 that include Search, Lens, Docs, Maps, and Assistant, among others.
What does Gemini 2.0 bring to the table?
Today we’re excited to launch our next era of models built for this new agentic era: introducing Gemini 2.0, our most capable model yet. With new advances in multimodality — like native image and audio output — and native tool use, it will enable us to build new AI agents that bring us closer to our vision of a universal assistant.
Sundar Pichai
CEO of Google and Alphabet
Demis Hassabis
CEO of Google DeepMind
Koray Kavukcuoglu
CTO of Google DeepMind
According to Google, Gemini 2.0’s first model is an experimental model version of Gemini 2.0 Flash that’s supposed to address low latency while also enhancing performance at scale. Google’s Gemini 2.0 Flash evolves from the previous version of 1.5 and based on Google’s developer benchmarks, outperforms version 1.5 by with almost twice the speed.
Gemini 2.0 Flash also supports multimodal outputs such as ‘natively generated images mixed with text and steerable text-to-speech (TTS) multilingual audio,” in addition to the previous support of multimodal inputs.
Google pitched Gemini 2.0 as the model that will usher in the agentic era and by that, the company referred to its Project Astra as the exploration of 2.0 Flash to accomplish more streamline ‘human-agent interactions’ through a universal AI assistant.
Project Astra: agents using multimodal understanding in the real world
Since we introduced Project Astra at I/O, we’ve been learning from trusted testers using it on Android phones. Their valuable feedback has helped us better understand how a universal AI assistant could work in practice, including implications for safety and ethics. Improvements in the latest version built with Gemini 2.0 include:
- Better dialogue: Project Astra now has the ability to converse in multiple languages and in mixed languages, with a better understanding of accents and uncommon words.
- New tool use: With Gemini 2.0, Project Astra can use Google Search, Lens and Maps, making it more useful as an assistant in your everyday life.
- Better memory: We’ve improved Project Astra’s ability to remember things while keeping you in control. It now has up to 10 minutes of in-session memory and can remember more conversations you had with it in the past, so it is better personalized to you.
- Improved latency: With new streaming capabilities and native audio understanding, the agent can understand language at about the latency of human conversation.
We’re working to bring these types of capabilities to Google products like Gemini app, our AI assistant, and to other form factors like glasses. And we’re starting to expand our trusted tester program to more people, including a small group that will soon begin testing Project Astra on prototype glasses.
Starting today, Google is making Gemini 2.0 available to users via its Gemini app and Google assistant as they incorporate the chat optimized versions of 2.0 Flash over the next year. Users can find it by selecting the model drop-down on the desktop UI as well as in the mobile app.
Developers can get more direct access to 2.0 Flash through the Gemini API libraries in Google AI Studio and Vertex AI with general availability coming in January 2025 for more model sizes.
