Google unveils a next-gen AI reasoning model

On Tuesday, Google unveiled Gemini 2.5, a new family of AI reasoning models that pauses to “think” before answering a question.

To kick off the new family of models, Google is launching Gemini 2.5 Pro Experimental, a multimodal, reasoning AI model that the company claims is its most intelligent model yet. This model will be available on Tuesday in the company’s developer platform, Google AI Studio, as well as in the Gemini app for subscribers to the company’s $20-a-month AI plan, Gemini Advanced.

Moving forward, Google says all of its new AI models will have reasoning capabilities baked in.

Since OpenAI launched the first AI reasoning model in September 2024, o1, the tech industry has raced to match or exceed that model’s capabilities with their own. Today, Anthropic, DeepSeek, Google, and xAI all have AI reasoning models, which use extra computing power and time to fact-check and reason through problems before delivering an answer.

Reasoning techniques have helped AI models achieve new heights in math and coding tasks. Many in the tech world believe reasoning models will be a key component of AI agents, autonomous systems that can perform tasks largely san human intervention. However, these models are also more expensive.

Google claims that Gemini 2.5 Pro outperforms its previous frontier AI models, and some of the competing leading AI models, on several benchmarks. Specifically, Google says it designed Gemini 2.5 to excel at creating visually compelling web apps and agentic coding applications.

On an evaluation measuring code editing, called Aider Polyglot, Google says Gemini 2.5 Pro scores 68.6%, outperforming leading AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepSeek.

However, on another test measuring agentic coding abilities, SWE-bench verified, Gemini 2.5 Pro scores 63.8%, outperforming OpenAI’s o3-mini and DeepSeek’s R1, but underperforming Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet, which scored 70.3%.

On Humanity’s Last Exam — a multimodal test including thousands of crowdsourced questions around math, humanities, and the natural sciences — Google says Gemini 2.5 Pro scores 18.8%, outperforming leading AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepSeek.

To start, Google says Gemini 2.5 Pro is shipping with a 1 million token context window, which means the AI model can intake roughly 750,000 words in a single prompt. That’s longer than the entire Lord of The Rings book series. However, Google says a 2 million token context window is coming soon.

Google has experimented before with AI reasoning models — previously releasing a “thinking” version of Gemini in December — but Gemini 2.5 represents the company’s most serious competitor to OpenAI o series of models yet.

Google didn’t share API pricing for Gemini 2.5 Pro.