Google Celebrates Genesis Of AI’s ‘Agentic Era’ With Gemini 2.0

Google Celebrates Genesis Of AI’s ‘Agentic Era’ With Gemini 2.0

Gemini 2.0 solidifies Google’s status as a leader in advanced AI development and Google leaders say it could usher in an era of AI agents.

Google unveiled Gemini 2.0 on Wednesday, the latest version of its flagship AI model, sharpening its competitive edge in the AI arms race. Designed to usher in the “agentic era” of artificial intelligence, the model lays the groundwork for systems that can act autonomously on users’ behalf, transforming digital tools and workflows.

The launch marks a major milestone towards what Google calls the “agentic era” of artificial intelligence–where AI systems can act on users’ behalf. 

Google CEO Sundar Pichai said Gemini 2.0 is the company’s “most capable model yet” and a major leap over its predecessors. While Gemini 1.0 “was about organizing and understanding information,” Pichai said the latest model is all about making information “much more useful.”

The model is faster, more capable, and more efficient than earlier models, Google said, and is multi-modal, meaning it can process and generate text, images and audio. The ability to support an array of modalities has become an increasingly important feature for AI companies as they race to integrate the technology into a range of creative and productivity tools. 

Pichai said advances in multimodality “will enable us to build new AI agents” and bring Google closer to realising its goal of creating a “universal assistant.” 

Agentic AI 

Google’s vision for “agentic” AI is central to Gemini 2.0’s launch. Unlike traditional AI tools like chatbots that respond to commands, AI agents can act autonomously, making decisions and executing tasks independently. For example, AI agents could surf the web using a browser or navigate a virtual world of a video game. 

“The practical application of AI agents is a research area full of exciting possibilities,” Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and CTO Koray Kavukcuoglu said in a blog post announcing the launch. “We’re exploring this new frontier with a series of prototypes that can help people accomplish tasks and get things done,” the duo said. The duo highlighted a number of potential agents Gemini 2.0 could power, including Project Astra, Google’s prototype of a “universal AI assistant,” Jules, an AI-powered code agent to help developers, and Project Mariner, “which explores the future of human-agent interaction, starting with your browser.” 

While stressing that agents are “still in the early stages of development,” Hassabis, a joint winner of this year’s Nobel Prize in chemistry, and Kavukcuoglu said they are “excited to see how trusted testers use these new capabilities and what lessons we can learn.” In time, Google will “make them more widely available in products,” the pair said, without indicating a timeline. 

When, and Where, Will Gemini 2.0 Appear?

Gemini 2.0 is still very much an “experimental” product. Initially, users will only have access to a scaled-down experimental model called Gemini 2.0 Flash.

Though at the lower end of the Gemini 2.0 family, Google said Gemini 2.0 Flash still outperforms its top 1.5 Pro model on key benchmarks like coding, the ability to provide factually correct responses to requests and image and video analysis. Moreover, it does so “at twice the speed.” 

2.0 Flash is available in a chatbot version to Gemini users globally, Google said, with developers and testers gaining access to an experimental multimodal model via the Gemini API in Google AI Studio and Vertex AI, a cloud platform. 

“General availability will follow in January, along with more model sizes,” Google said.  

The Agentic Future of AI

Gemini 2.0 not only represents a leap forward for Google’s AI ambitions but also signals a shift toward more proactive, autonomous AI systems that have the potential to reshape how people work with technology. Such agents are touted as the next step forward for generative AI following the successes of large language models like ChatGPT and they will likely define how the technology is used in 2025 and beyond.

“I can’t wait to see what this next era brings,” Pichai said.

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