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Gemini 2.0 is now available to everyone

612 points| meetpateltech | 1 year ago |blog.google

269 comments

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[+] singhrac|1 year ago|reply
What is the model I get at gemini.google.com (i.e. through my Workspace subscription)? It says "Gemini Advanced" but there are no other details. No model selection option.

I find the lack of clarity very frustrating. If I want to try Google's "best" model, should I be purchasing something? AI Studio seems focused around building an LLM wrapper app, but I just want something to answer my questions.

Edit: what I've learned through Googling: (1) if you search "is gemini advanced included with workspace" you get an AI overview answer that seems to be incorrect, since they now include Gemini Advanced (?) with every workspace subscription.(2) a page exists telling you to buy the add-on (Gemini for Google Workspace), but clicking on it says this is no longer available because of the above. (3) gemini.google.com says "Gemini Advanced" (no idea which model) at the top, but gemini.google.com/advanced redirects me to what I have deduced is the consumer site (?) which tells me that Gemini Advanced is another $20/month

The problem, Google PMs if you're reading this, is that the gemini.google.com page does not have ANY information about what is going on. What model is this? What are the limits? Do I get access to "Deep Research"? Does this subscription give me something in aistudio? What about code artifacts? The settings option tells me I can change to dark mode (thanks!).

Edit 2: I decided to use aistudio.google.com since it has a dropdown for me on my workspace plan.

[+] vldmrs|1 year ago|reply
This is funny how bad UI is on some of websites which are considered the best. Today I tried to find prices for Mistral models but I couldn’t. Their prices page leads to 404…
[+] pjc50|1 year ago|reply
> you get an AI overview answer that seems to be incorrect

It seems AI cannot yet defeat the obfuscation of its own product managers. Great advert for AI, that.

[+] radicality|1 year ago|reply
Google workspace is always such a mess. I also have Google workspace, and it did let me do some chatting in the Gemini app few days ago. No idea what model, and of course there was no dropdown.

Just today I wanted to continue a conversation from two days ago, and after writing to the chat, I just get back an error “This chat was created with Gemini Advanced. Get it now to continue this chat.” And I don’t even know if that’s a bug, or some expected sales funnel where they gave me a nibble of it for free and now want me to pay up.

[+] behnamoh|1 year ago|reply
The number one reason I don't use Google Gemini is because they truncate the input text. So I can't simply paste long documents or other kinds of things as raw text in the prompt box.
[+] nudpiedo|1 year ago|reply
Today I wasted 1 hour looking in how to use or where to find "Deep Research”.

I could not. I have the business workplace standard, which contains the Gemini advance, not sure whether I need a VPN, pay a separate AI product, or even pay a higher workplace tier or what the heck is going on at all.

There are so many confusing products interrelated and lack of focus everywhere that I really do not know anymore whether it is worth as an AI provider.

[+] coolgoose|1 year ago|reply
Plus one on this it's so stupid, but also mandatory in a way. Sigh
[+] ysofunny|1 year ago|reply
hmm did you try clickin where it says 'gemini advanced'? I find it opens a drop down
[+] rickette|1 year ago|reply
"what model are you using, exact name please" is usually the first prompt I enter when trying out something.
[+] mohsen1|1 year ago|reply
> available via the Gemini API in Google AI Studio and Vertex AI.

> Gemini 2.0, 2.0 Pro and 2.0 Pro Experimental, Gemini 2.0 Flash, Gemini 2.0 Flash Lite

3 different ways of accessing the API, more than 5 different but extremely similarly named models. Benchmarks only comparing to their own models.

Can't be more "Googley"!

[+] justanotheratom|1 year ago|reply
They actually have two "studios"

Google AI Studio and Google Cloud Vertex AI Studio

And both have their own documentation, different ways of "tuning" the model.

Talk about shipping the org chart.

[+] seanhunter|1 year ago|reply
I don't know why you're finding it confusing. There's Duff, Duff Lite and now there's also all-new Duff Dry.
[+] ssijak|1 year ago|reply
Working with google APIs is often an exercise in frustration. I like their base cloud offering the best actually, but their additional APIs can be all over the place. These AI related are the worst.
[+] raverbashing|1 year ago|reply
Honestly naming conventions in the AI world have been appalling regardless of the company
[+] nitwit005|1 year ago|reply
Clearly, the next step is to rename one to "Google Chat".
[+] llm_trw|1 year ago|reply
You missed the first sentence of the release:

>In December, we kicked off the agentic era by releasing an experimental version of Gemini 2.0 Flash

I guess I wasn't building AI agents in February last year.

[+] pmayrgundter|1 year ago|reply
I tried voice chat. It's very good, except for the politics

We started talking about my plans for the day, and I said I was making chili. G asked if I have a recipe or if I needed one. I said, I started with Obama's recipe many years ago and have worked on it from there.

G gave me a form response that it can't talk politics.

Oh, I'm not talking politics, I'm talking chili.

G then repeated form response and tried to change conversation, and as long as I didn't use the O word, we were allowed to proceed. Phew

[+] xnorswap|1 year ago|reply
I find it horrifying and dystopian that the part where it "Can't talk politics" is just accepted and your complaint is that it interrupts your ability to talk chilli.

"Go back to bed America." "You are free, to do as we tell you"

https://youtu.be/TNPeYflsMdg?t=143

[+] heresie-dabord|1 year ago|reply
"I can't talk politics."

It's a question of right or wrong.

"I can't talk politics."

It's a question of health care.

"I can't talk politics."

It's a question of fact vs fiction, knowledge vs ignorance.

"I can't talk politics."

You are a slave to a master that does not believe in integrity, ethics, community, and social values.

"I can't talk politics."

[+] petre|1 year ago|reply
I find it kind of useless due to the no politics and I usually quickly lose my patience with it. Same with DeepSeek. Meanwhile you can have a decent conversation with Mistral, Claude, pi.ai and other LLMs. Even Chat GPT, although the patronizing appologizing tone is annoying.
[+] everdrive|1 year ago|reply
This is AI. Someone else decides what topics and what answers are acceptable.
[+] pmayrgundter|1 year ago|reply
Note, had the same convo with ChatG and it blew right by the O word, and commented that it's nice to have an old recipe to work on over time.
[+] theragra|1 year ago|reply
I asked why Trump likes numbers 4 and 7. Apparently, this is forbidden topic! Google is insane.
[+] croisillon|1 year ago|reply
on the other hand, i'd be very weary of anyone eating Trump's chili recipe
[+] leetharris|1 year ago|reply
These names are unbelievably bad. Flash, Flash-Lite? How do these AI companies keep doing this?

Sonnet 3.5 v2

o3-mini-high

Gemini Flash-Lite

It's like a competition to see who can make the goofiest naming conventions.

Regarding model quality, we experiment with Google models constantly at Rev and they are consistently the worst of all the major players. They always benchmark well and consistently fail in real tasks. If this is just a small update to the gemini-exp-1206 model, then I think they will still be in last place.

[+] silvajoao|1 year ago|reply
Try out the new models at https://aistudio.google.com.

It's a great way to experiment with all the Gemini models that are also available via the API.

If you haven't yet, try also Live mode at https://aistudio.google.com/live.

You can have a live conversation with Gemini and have the model see the world via your phone camera (or see your desktop via screenshare on the web), and talk about it. It's quite a cool experience! It made me feel the joy of programming and using computers that I had had so many times before.

[+] serjester|1 year ago|reply
For anyone that parsing PDF's this is a game changer in term of price per dollar - I wrote a blog about it [1]. I think a lot of people were nervous about pricing since they released the beta, and although it's slightly more expensive than 1.5 Flash, this is still incredibly cost-effective. Looking forward to also benchmarking the lite version.

[1] https://www.sergey.fyi/articles/gemini-flash-2

[+] simonw|1 year ago|reply
I upgraded my llm-gemini plugin to handle this, and shared the results of my "Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle" benchmark here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Feb/5/gemini-2/

The pricing is interesting: Gemini 2.0 Flash-Lite is 7.5c/million input tokens and 30c/million output tokens - half the price of OpenAI's GPT-4o mini (15c/60c).

Gemini 2.0 Flash isn't much more: 10c/million for text/image input, 70c/million for audio input, 40c/million for output. Again, cheaper than GPT-4o mini.

[+] iimaginary|1 year ago|reply
The only benchmark worth paying attention to.
[+] zamadatix|1 year ago|reply
Is there a way to see/compare the shared results for all of the LLMs you've tested this prompt on in one place? The 2.0 pro result seems decent but I don't have a baseline if that's because it is or if the other 2 are just "extremely bad" or something.
[+] qingcharles|1 year ago|reply
Not a bad pelican from 2.0 Pro! The singularity is almost upon us :)
[+] mattlondon|1 year ago|reply
The SVGs are starting to look actually recognisable! You'll need a new benchmark soon :)
[+] jbarrow|1 year ago|reply
I've been very impressed by Gemini 2.0 Flash for multimodal tasks, including object detection and localization[1], plus document tasks. But the 15 requests per minute limit was a severe limiter while it was experimental. I'm really excited to be able to actually _do_ things with the model.

In my experience, I'd reach for Gemini 2.0 Flash over 4o in a lot of multimodal/document use cases. Especially given the differences in price ($0.10/million input and $0.40/million output versus $2.50/million input and $10.00/million output).

That being said, Qwen2.5 VL 72B and 7B seem even better at document image tasks and localization.

[1] https://notes.penpusher.app/Misc/Google+Gemini+101+-+Object+...

[+] starchild3001|1 year ago|reply
I use all top of the line models everyday. Not for coding, but for general "cognitive" tasks like research, thinking, analysis, writing etc. What Google calls Gemini Pro 2.0 has been my most favorite model for the past couple of months. I think o1/4o come pretty close. Those are kinda equals, with a slight preference for Gemini. Claude has fallen behind, clearly. DeepSeek is intriguing. It excels occassionally where others won't. For consistency's sake, Gemini Pro 2.0 is amazing.

I highly recommend using it via https://aistudio.google.com/. Gemini app has some additional bells and whistles, but for some reason quality isn't always on par with aistudio. Also Gemini app seems to have more filters -- it seems more shy answering controversial topics. Just some general impressions.

[+] gwern|1 year ago|reply
2.0 Pro Experimental seems like the big news here?

> Today, we’re releasing an experimental version of Gemini 2.0 Pro that responds to that feedback. It has the strongest coding performance and ability to handle complex prompts, with better understanding and reasoning of world knowledge, than any model we’ve released so far. It comes with our largest context window at 2 million tokens, which enables it to comprehensively analyze and understand vast amounts of information, as well as the ability to call tools like Google Search and code execution.

[+] Ninjinka|1 year ago|reply
Pricing is CRAZY.

Audio input is $0.70 per million tokens on 2.0 Flash, $0.075 for 2.0 Flash-Lite and 1.5 Flash.

For gpt-4o-mini-audio-preview, it's $10 per million tokens of audio input.

[+] butlike|1 year ago|reply
Flash is back, baby.

Next release should be called Gemini Macromedia

[+] leonidasv|1 year ago|reply
That 1M tokens context window alone is going to kill a lot of RAG use cases. Crazy to see how we went from 4K tokens context windows (2023 ChatGPT-3.5) to 1M in less than 2 years.
[+] esafak|1 year ago|reply
Benchmarks or it didn't happen. Anything better than https://lmarena.ai/?leaderboard?

My experience with the Gemini 1.5 models has been positive. I think Google has caught up.

[+] msuvakov|1 year ago|reply
Gemini 2.0 works great with large context. A few hours ago, I posted a ShowHN about parsing an entire book in a single prompt. The goal was to extract characters, relationships, and descriptions that could then be used for image generation:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42946317

[+] mtaras|1 year ago|reply
Updates for Gemini models will always be exciting to me because of how generous free API tier is, I barely run into limits for personal use. Huge context window is a huge advantage for use in personal projects, too
[+] staticman2|1 year ago|reply
I have a fun query in AI studio where I pasted a 800,000 token Wuxia martial arts novel and ask it worldbuilding questions.

1.5 pro and the old 2.0 flash experimental generated responses in AI studio but the new 2.0 models respond with blank answers.

I wonder if it's timing out or some sort of newer censorship models is preventing 2.0 from answering my query. The novel is pg-13 at most but references to "bronze skinned southern barbarians" "courtesans" "drugs" "demonic sects" and murder could I guess set it off.

[+] sho_hn|1 year ago|reply
Anyone have a take on how the coding performance (quality and speed) of the 2.0 Pro Experimental compares to o3-mini-high?

The 2 million token window sure feels exciting.