Google AI News & Updates

Google Releases Enhanced Gemini 2.5 Pro Model with Improved Coding Capabilities

Google has launched Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview (I/O edition), an updated AI model with significantly improved coding and web app development capabilities. The model tops several benchmarks including the WebDev Arena Leaderboard and achieves 84.8% on the VideoMME benchmark for video understanding.

Google's Gemini 2.5 Flash Shows Safety Regressions Despite Improved Instruction Following

Google has disclosed in a technical report that its recent Gemini 2.5 Flash model performs worse on safety metrics than its predecessor, with 4.1% regression in text-to-text safety and 9.6% in image-to-text safety. The company attributes this partly to the model's improved instruction-following capabilities, even when those instructions involve sensitive content, reflecting an industry-wide trend of making AI models more permissive in responding to controversial topics.

Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro Safety Report Falls Short of Transparency Standards

Google published a technical safety report for its Gemini 2.5 Pro model several weeks after its public release, which experts criticize as lacking critical safety details. The sparse report omits detailed information about Google's Frontier Safety Framework and dangerous capability evaluations, raising concerns about the company's commitment to AI safety transparency despite prior promises to regulators.

Google Adopts Anthropic's Model Context Protocol for AI Data Connectivity

Google has announced it will support Anthropic's Model Context Protocol (MCP) in its Gemini models and SDK, following OpenAI's similar adoption. MCP enables two-way connections between AI models and external data sources, allowing models to access and interact with business tools, software, and content repositories to complete tasks.

Google Introduces Agentic Capabilities to Gemini Code Assist for Complex Coding Tasks

Google has enhanced its Gemini Code Assist with new agentic capabilities that can complete multi-step programming tasks such as creating applications from product specifications or transforming code between programming languages. The update includes a Kanban board for managing AI agents that can generate work plans and report progress on job requests, though reliability concerns remain as studies show AI code generators frequently introduce security vulnerabilities and bugs.

Google Launches Gemini 2.5 Flash: Efficiency-Focused AI Model with Reasoning Capabilities

Google has announced Gemini 2.5 Flash, a new AI model designed for efficiency while maintaining strong performance. The model offers dynamic computing controls allowing developers to adjust processing time based on query complexity, making it suitable for high-volume, cost-sensitive applications like customer service and document parsing while featuring self-checking reasoning capabilities.

Google Sets Premium Pricing for Gemini 2.5 Pro Amid Rising Costs for Top AI Models

Google has announced pricing for its Gemini 2.5 Pro model at $1.25 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, making it Google's most expensive AI offering to date. This pricing, while higher than some competitors like OpenAI's o3-mini, reflects an industry-wide trend of increasing costs for flagship AI models, potentially driven by high demand and significant computing expenses.

Google Accelerates AI Model Releases While Delaying Safety Documentation

Google has significantly increased the pace of its AI model releases, launching Gemini 2.5 Pro just three months after Gemini 2.0 Flash, but has failed to publish safety reports for these latest models. Despite being one of the first companies to propose model cards for responsible AI development and making commitments to governments about transparency, Google has not released a model card in over a year, raising concerns about prioritizing speed over safety.

Google Launches Gemini 2.5 Pro with Advanced Reasoning Capabilities

Google has unveiled Gemini 2.5, a new family of AI models with built-in reasoning capabilities that pauses to "think" before answering questions. The flagship model, Gemini 2.5 Pro Experimental, outperforms competing AI models on several benchmarks including code editing and supports a 1 million token context window (expanding to 2 million soon).

Google to Replace Assistant with Gemini Across All Devices

Google has announced plans to phase out Google Assistant on Android and replace it with Gemini across mobile devices, tablets, cars, and connected accessories over the coming months. The company is enhancing Gemini with previously Assistant-exclusive features like music playback, timers, and lock screen functionality, presenting it as a more advanced successor with greater capabilities.