Google opens its most powerful AI models to everyone, the next stage in its virtual agent push
Google on Wednesday released Gemini 2.0 — its "most capable" artificial intelligence model suite yet — to everyone.
In December, the company gave access to developers and trusted testers, as well as wrapping some features into Google products, but this is a "general release," according to Google.
The suite of models includes 2.0 Flash, which is billed as a "workhorse model, optimal for high-volume, high-frequency tasks at scale," as well as 2.0 Pro Experimental for coding performance, and 2.0 Flash-Lite, which the company calls its "most cost-efficient model yet."
Gemini Flash costs developers 10 cents per million tokens for text, image and video inputs, while Flash-Lite, its more cost-effective version, costs 0.75 of a cent for the same. Tokens refer to each individual unit of data that the model processes.
The continued releases are part of a broader strategy for Google of investing heavily into AI agents as the AI arms race heats up among tech giants and startups alike.
Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic are also moving toward agentic AI, or models that can complete complex multistep tasks on a user's behalf, rather than a user having to walk them through every individual step.
"Over the last year, we have been investing in developing more agentic models, meaning they can understand more about the world around you, think multiple steps ahead, and take action on your behalf, with your supervision," Google wrote in a December blog post, adding that Gemini 2.0 has "new advances in multimodality — like native image and audio output — and native tool use," and that the family of models "will enable us to build new AI agents that bring us closer to our vision of a universal assistant."
Anthropic, the Amazon-backed AI