Google announces launch of latest AI model, Gemini 2.0

NEW YORK

Google has announced the launch of Gemini 2.0, its most advanced artificial intelligence model to date, as the world's tech giants race to take the lead in the fast developing technology.

CEO Sundar Pichai said the new model would mark what the company calls "a new agentic era" in AI development, with AI models designed to understand and make decisions about the world around you.

"Gemini 2.0 is about making information much more useful," Pichai said in the announcement, emphasizing the model's enhanced ability to understand context, think multiple steps ahead and take supervised actions on behalf of users.

The developments "bring us closer to our vision of a universal assistant," he added.

The release sent shares in Google soaring by more than 4 percent on Wall Street a day after the stock already gained 3.5 percent after the release of a breakthrough quantum chip.

The tech giants are furiously taking steps to release more powerful AI models despite their immense cost and some questions about their immediate usefulness to the broader economy.

An AI "agent," the latest Silicon Valley trend, is a digital helper that is supposed to sense surroundings, make decisions, and take actions to achieve specific goals.

The tech giants promise that agents will be the next stage of an AI revolution that was sparked by the 2022 launch of ChatGPT, which took the world by storm.

Gemini 2.0 is initially being rolled out to developers and trusted testers, with plans for broader integration across Google's products, particularly in Search and the Gemini platform.

The technology is powered by Google's sixth-generation TPU (Tensor Processing Unit) hardware, dubbed Trillium, which the company has now made generally available to customers.

Most AI training has been monopolized by chip juggernaut Nvidia, which has been catapulted by the AI explosion to become one of the world's most valuable companies.