Google’s Gemini app adds access to ‘thinking’ AI models

Google is bringing its experimental “reasoning” artificial intelligence model capable of explaining how it answers complex questions to the Gemini app. The Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking update is part of a slew of Gemini 2.0 AI rollouts announced by Google today, including its latest Gemini 2.0 Pro flagship model.

This comes as the search giant is expecting to invest $75 billion on expenditures like growing its monotonously named family of AI models this year. That’s a considerable jump from the $32.3 billion on capital expenditures it spent in 2023, with Google now racing to keep up with AI competitors like OpenAI, Microsoft, Meta, and the Amazon-backed Anthropic.

Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking will be available in the model dropdown options on the desktop and mobile app starting today, alongside another, more agentic, version of the model that can “interact with apps like YouTube, Search, and Google Maps,” according to Google. It was introduced in December 2024 and is expected to compete with other so-called reasoning AI models like OpenAI’s o1 and DeepSeek’s R1.

These models work by breaking problems down into smaller, manageable steps, allowing them to “think” about prompts before offering a solution. The intended outcome is to achieve stronger and more accurate results, but this is often at the expense of taking longer to achieve them.

Google is also releasing an experimental version of Gemini 2.0 Pro. According to leaks of the preview reported by TechCrunch, the successor to Gemini 1.5 Pro should provide “better factuality” and “stronger performance” for coding and mathematics-related tasks. Gemini 2.0 Pro is described as Google’s “most capable model yet,” and will be available to Advanced Gemini app users and people with access to Vertex AI and AI Studio.

Gemini 2.0 Flash — the latest version of Google’s high-efficiency workhorse AI model — is also now generally available to developers in AI Studio and Vertex AI following its rollout to Gemini’s web and mobile apps last week.

Lastly, Google is rounding off these updates with the introduction of a new low-cost model called 2.0 Flash-Lite, which the company says matches 1.5 Flash for speed and price while outperforming it “on the majority of benchmarks.” Gemini 2.0 Flash-Lite is launching in public preview today on Google’s AI Studio and Vertex AI.