Gemini 2.0

The AI war between Google and OpenAI has never been more heated

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Over the past month, we’ve seen a rapid cadence of notable AI-related announcements and releases from both Google and OpenAI, and it’s been making the AI community’s head spin. It has also poured fuel on the fire of the OpenAI-Google rivalry, an accelerating game of one-upmanship taking place unusually close to the Christmas holiday.

“How are people surviving with the firehose of AI updates that are coming out,” wrote one user on X last Friday, which is still a hotbed of AI-related conversation. “in the last <24 hours we got gemini flash 2.0 and chatGPT with screenshare, deep research, pika 2, sora, chatGPT projects, anthropic clio, wtf it never ends."

Rumors travel quickly in the AI world, and people in the AI industry had been expecting OpenAI to ship some major products in December. Once OpenAI announced “12 days of OpenAI” earlier this month, Google jumped into gear and seemingly decided to try to one-up its rival on several counts. So far, the strategy appears to be working, but it’s coming at the cost of the rest of the world being able to absorb the implications of the new releases.

“12 Days of OpenAI has turned into like 50 new @GoogleAI releases,” wrote another X user on Monday. “This past week, OpenAI & Google have been releasing at the speed of a new born startup,” wrote a third X user on Tuesday. “Even their own users can’t keep up. Crazy time we’re living in.”

“Somebody told Google that they could just do things,” wrote a16z partner and AI influencer Justine Moore on X, referring to a common motivational meme telling people they “can just do stuff.”

The Google AI rush

OpenAI’s “12 Days of OpenAI” campaign has included releases of their full o1 model, an upgrade from o1-preview, alongside o1-pro for advanced “reasoning” tasks. The company also publicly launched Sora for video generation, added Projects functionality to ChatGPT, introduced Advanced Voice features with video streaming capabilities, and more.

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Not to be outdone by OpenAI, Google releases its own “reasoning” AI model

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Google DeepMind’s chief scientist, Jeff Dean, says that the model receives extra computing power, writing on X, “we see promising results when we increase inference time computation!” The model works by pausing to consider multiple related prompts before providing what it determines to be the most accurate answer.

Since OpenAI’s jump into the “reasoning” field in September with o1-preview and o1-mini, several companies have been rushing to achieve feature parity with their own models. For example, DeepSeek launched DeepSeek-R1 in early November, while Alibaba’s Qwen team released its own “reasoning” model, QwQ earlier this month.

While some claim that reasoning models can help solve complex mathematical or academic problems, these models might not be for everybody. While they perform well on some benchmarks, questions remain about their actual usefulness and accuracy. Also, the high computing costs needed to run reasoning models have created some rumblings about their long-term viability. That high cost is why OpenAI’s ChatGPT Pro costs $200 a month, for example.

Still, it appears Google is serious about pursuing this particular AI technique. Logan Kilpatrick, a Google employee in its AI Studio, called it “the first step in our reasoning journey” in a post on X.

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Google goes “agentic” with Gemini 2.0’s ambitious AI agent features

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On Wednesday, Google unveiled Gemini 2.0, the next generation of its AI-model family, starting with an experimental release called Gemini 2.0 Flash. The model family can generate text, images, and speech while processing multiple types of input including text, images, audio, and video. It’s similar to multimodal AI models like GPT-4o, which powers OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

“Gemini 2.0 Flash builds on the success of 1.5 Flash, our most popular model yet for developers, with enhanced performance at similarly fast response times,” said Google in a statement. “Notably, 2.0 Flash even outperforms 1.5 Pro on key benchmarks, at twice the speed.”

Gemini 2.0 Flash—which is the smallest model of the 2.0 family in terms of parameter count—launches today through Google’s developer platforms like Gemini API, AI Studio, and Vertex AI. However, its image generation and text-to-speech features remain limited to early access partners until January 2025. Google plans to integrate the tech into products like Android Studio, Chrome DevTools, and Firebase.

The company addressed potential misuse of generated content by implementing SynthID watermarking technology on all audio and images created by Gemini 2.0 Flash. This watermark appears in supported Google products to identify AI-generated content.

Google’s newest announcements lean heavily into the concept of agentic AI systems that can take action for you. “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,” said Google CEO Sundar Pichai in a statement. “Today we’re excited to launch our next era of models built for this new agentic era.”

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