Google Gemini 2.0 Flash model has been announced by the company within a span of a year after Gemini was first announced. Google has been progressing quickly in the AI space and Gemini 2.0 Flash has now been revealed as the brand’s workhorse model with low Latency and enhanced performance.
“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,” said Sundar Pichai, CEO at Google, in a blog post. Starting today, Gemini 2.0 Flash experimental model will be available to all Gemini users.
Aside from that, Google is also bringing the advanced reasoning capabilities of Gemini 2.0 to AI Overviews to tackle more complex topics and multi-step questions, including advanced math equations, multimodal queries and coding. The company started limited testing this week and will be rolling it out more broadly early next year. And it’ll continue to bring AI Overviews to more countries and languages over the next year.
Google Gemini 2.0 Flash: Details to Know
Gemini 2.0 Flash builds on the success of 1.5 Flash, which the company states has been the most popular model with developers. Notably, 2.0 Flash outperforms 1.5 Pro on key benchmarks at twice the speed. 2.0 Flash also comes with new capabilities.
In addition to supporting multimodal inputs like images, video, and audio, 2.0 Flash now supports multimodal outputs like natively generated images mixed with text and steerable text-to-speech (TTS) multilingual audio. It can also natively call tools like Google Search, code execution, and third-party user-defined functions.
Read More: Google Tests Gemini-backed Help Me Create Feature in Google Docs
Gemini 2.0 Flash is available now as an experimental model to developers via the Gemini API in Google AI Studio and Vertex AI with multimodal input and text output available to all developers, and text-to-speech and native image generation available to early-access partners. General availability will follow in January, along with more model sizes.
To help developers build dynamic and interactive applications, we’re also releasing a new Multimodal Live API with real-time audio and video streaming input and the ability to use multiple, combined tools.
Further, Gemini users globally can access a chat-optimized version of 2.0 Flash experimental by selecting it in the model drop-down on desktop and mobile web. It will soon be available in the Gemini mobile app. “With this new model, users can experience an even more helpful Gemini assistant,” says the brand. Early next year, it’ll expand Gemini 2.0 to more Google products.
Gemini 2.0 Flash’s native user interface action-capabilities, along with other improvements like multimodal reasoning, long context understanding, complex instruction following and planning, compositional function-calling, native tool use and improved latency, all work in concert to enable a new class of agentic experiences.
Google is also using Gemini 2.0 in new research prototypes, including Project Astra, which explores the future capabilities of a universal AI assistant; Project Mariner, an early prototype capable of taking actions in Chrome as an experimental extension; and Jules, an experimental AI-powered code agent.