Google releases Gemini 2.0 models: 'We kicked off the agentic era'

In response to Deepseek's rising competition from DeepSeek, Google has officially released its latest AI model, Gemini 2.0, The launch was announced in Google's Blog detailing the expanded availability of Gemini 2.0 models, highlighting improvements in efficiency, coding performance, AI safety, and costs.

The new offerings include Gemini 2.0 Flash, a high-speed multi-modal model (allowing voice, text, image, and video inputs) optimized for large-scale tasks. Gemini 2.0 Pro (Experimental), Google's most powerful coding and complex reasoning model. As well as Gemini 2.0 Flash-Lite, a cost-efficient AI model that iterates on the previous Gemini 1.5 Flash.

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The move comes in response to escalating competition from Chinese firm DeepSeek, who burst onto the scene with the market-shaking DeepSeek R1 model on January 20. Google are not the only firm to release new offerings in response to the Chinese competitor, with OpenAI quickly releasing their latest model o3-mini free of charge. Along with autonomous AI agents 'Operator' and 'Deep Research' in rapid succession.

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The release of the Gemini 2.0 series included a range of benchmarks, highlighting the advancements in high-frequency tasks, coding, complex reasoning, and long-context understanding. Google also emphasized the release as the next phase in their AI evolution, writing:

"Our best model yet for coding performance and complex prompts"

"We kicked off the agentic era"

While benchmarks provide a technical snapshot of the model's performance improvements, the real test is how they stack up in the hands of users. Gemini 2.0 Flash is available to Gemini Advanced users via the Gemini API in Google AI Studio, Vertex AI, and the Gemini app. You can also get your hands on Gemini 2.0 Pro (Experimental) and Gemini Flash-Lite through Google AI Studio and Vertex AI.