Gemini 2.0
Google is releasing Gemini 2.0 on Wednesday, about 10 months after the company first launched 1.5. It’s still in what Google calls an “experimental preview,” and only one version of the model — the smaller, lower-end 2.0 Flash — is being released. But Hassabis says it’s still a big day.
“Effectively,” Hassabis says, “it’s as good as the current Pro model is. So you can think of it as one whole tier better, for the same cost efficiency and performance efficiency and speed. We’re really happy with that.” And not only is it better at doing the old things Gemini could do but it can also do new things. Gemini 2.0 can now natively generate audio and images, and it brings new multimodal capabilities that Hassabis says lay the groundwork for the next big thing in AI: agents.
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Google is also launching Project Mariner, an experimental new Chrome extension that can quite literally use your web browser for you. There’s also Jules, an agent specifically for helping developers find and fix bad code, and a new Gemini 2.0-based agent that can look at your screen and help you better play video games. Hassabis calls the game agent “an Easter egg” but also points to it as the sort of thing a truly multimodal, built-in model can do for you.
The basic idea of this seems to be that you ask Gemini a question about a topic, ideally something complex with several things you want to know, and it will go out and read a bunch of websites to generate a Google Doc with all if its findings. It takes a few minutes to do this, so you can even close the browser tab and come back when it’s done, but once it does, it creates a pretty decent “executive summary” of the topic at hand.
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I mentioned at the start that I prefer ChatGPT and Claude to Gemini, and I’m pretty confident that preference still stands even with these updates. I think Cluade is a very good coding assistant and its web UI is so much better than anyone else at letting me play with the generated code as I iterate on it.
If you watch a handful of videos showing how to troubleshoot a plumbing issue, for example, YouTube will start showing recommendations for other plumbing-related videos.
But you haven’t suddenly become a plumbing enthusiast. You needed to fix a single problem and, once you’re done, that’s it.
Previously:
- Apple Intelligence in macOS 15.2 and iOS 18.2
- Google’s AI Search and “Web” View
- Windows Copilot+ AI Features
- Google’s Gemini
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Who cares? We’ve got Apple Intelligence with Genmoji, a slightly less stupid Siri, and the ability to have notification summaries that aren’t quite right. Truly groundbreaking stuff — now excuse me while I go ask Siri to set a timer… ‘Hey Siri set a timer for 15 minutes’… ‘I found this on the web for “set a timer”’.
