- Google unveiled Gemini 2.0, enhancing the AI product’s capabilities.
- Gemini 2.0 focuses on agentic AI, improving multi-step problem-solving.
- Google’s Project Astra and Mariner showcase advanced AI integration with popular services.
It’s December, which apparently means it’s time for all the AI companies to show off what they’ve been working on for the past year. Not to be left out, Google lifted the lid on its next-generation AI model, Gemini 2.0, which it promises is a big step up in smarts and capabilities.
If the theme of Gemini 1.0 was multimodality — an ability to combine and understand different types of information, such as text and images — Gemini 2.0 is all about agents, AI that can act more autonomously and solve multi-step problems with limited human input.
“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 blog post announcing Gemini 2.0 on Wednesday.
Users can test out some of Gemini 2.0’s new abilities this week, including a new “Deep Research” feature that will have Gemini scour the web for information on a topic and prepare it in an easy-to-read report. Google said Deep Research, which will be available to Gemini Advanced subscribers, will perform like a human in the way it searches and locates relevant information on the web before starting a new search based on what it’s learned.
Google plans to bring Gemini 2.0 to its AI Overviews feature in Search. The feature, which has dramatically transformed the way Google retrieves answers from the web, got off to a rocky start (pizza glue, anyone?). Google then scaled Overviews back and made various technical tweaks to improve performance.
With Gemini 2.0, Google says Overviews can tackle more complex searches, including multi-step questions and multimodal queries that use text and images. Google said it’s already started testing the improved Overviews this week and will roll them out more broadly early next year.
This week, Google is also rolling out an experimental version of Gemini 2.0 Flash — a model designed for high-volume tasks at speed — that developers can play with. Anyone accessing the Gemini chatbot through the browser or the Gemini app will also be able to try it with the new model.
Google said Flash 2.0 will make Gemini faster, smarter, and more capable of reasoning. It’s also now capable of generating images natively (previously, Google had stitched on a separate AI model to conjure up pictures within Gemini). Google said that should improve image generation, as it’s drawing from Gemini 2.0’s vast knowledge of the world.
Project Astra
Most of the other interesting new announcements Google teased won’t be available for wider public consumption for a while.
One of these is Project Astra, which Google first previewed at I/O back in May. Google demoed a real-time AI assistant that could see the world around it and answer questions. Now, Google is showing an even better version of Astra built on Gemini 2.0, which the company said can draw on some of Google’s most popular services, such as Search, Lens, and Maps.
In a new virtual demo, Google showed someone holding up their phone camera to a London bus and Astra answering a question on whether that bus could get them to Chinatown. The new and improved Astra can also converse in multiple (and mixed) languages, Google said.
Google will roll out Astra to a limited number of early testers, and it didn’t say when more people will have access to it. Bibo Xu, the Astra product manager at Google DeepMind, told reporters on a call that Google expects these features to roll out through its apps over time, suggesting Astra may arrive incrementally rather than as one big product.
Google also teased Astra running on a pair of augmented reality glasses.
Project Mariner
Additionally, Google teased Project Mariner, a tool that lets AI take control of a browser and scour the web for information. It can recognize pixels, images, text, and code on a webpage and use them to navigate and find answers.
Google referred to Mariner as an early research prototype and said it’s only letting a select group of early testers try it via a Chrome extension.
“We’re early in our understanding of the full capabilities of AI agents for computer use and we understand the risks associated with AI models that can take actions on a user’s behalf,” said Google Labs product manager Jaclyn Konzelmann.
For example, Google said it would limit certain actions, such as by having Mariner ask for final confirmation before making an online purchase.
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