Everyone can now try Gemini 2.5 Pro - for free
Elyse Betters Picaro / ZDNET
Moments after DeepSeek released its latest model, another AI giant has already stolen back some of the limelight.
Last Tuesday, Google announced Gemini 2.5, its "most intelligent" model. The company said this initial release is an "experimental version of 2.5 Pro, which is state-of-the-art on a wide range of benchmarks and debuts at #1 on LMArena by a significant margin." Then, on Saturday, Google revealed 2.5 Pro is now available to all Gemini users at gemini.google.com.
Also:You can access free Gemini Gems on Android and iOS now - where to find them
A family of thinking models, meaning they reason through their responses, Google's Gemini 2.5 release follows the Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking models that landed in December.
Outperforming the competition
Gemini 2.5 Pro Experimental outperforms OpenAI's o3 mini and Anthropic's Claude 3.7 Sonnet on Humanity's Last Exam (HLE), a recently created benchmark designed to combat saturation -- or the problem of industry tests becoming too easy for rapidly evolving models. HLE is, therefore, a relatively harder test to perform well on. Gemini 2.5 scored 18.8% compared to o3 mini's 14% (evaluated using text problems only, no images) and Claude 3.7 Sonnet's 8.9%.
Also:Worried about DeepSeek? Turns out, Gemini is the biggest data offender
Already topping the Chatbot Arena leaderboard, the new model also outperformed competitors on common benchmarks for science, math, and coding, though usually by a smaller margin, which is now expected given the rate at which new models are accelerating. Google reported that Gemini 2.5 Pro Experimental shows improvements in reasoning, multimodal, and agentic capabilities, even from a "single line prompt."
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The new model also scored higher than its competitors on an IQ test hosted by testing site Tracking AI, which uses bespoke questions that are not publicly available and thus can't be included in training data. However, experts caution that human IQ tests -- beyond being questionable for having roots in eugenics -- are not exactly a useful measure of an AI model's capabilities, because human modalities of intelligence operate in significantly different ways.
Available to all Gemini users
Google posted on X that Gemini 2.5 Pro is available to all Gemini users "with rate limits," after an initially more narrow release, and it will be coming to mobile soon. While the company did not update the specifics, it reiterated that Gemini Advanced users still have "expanded access" in addition to a larger context window.
Also:5 easy Gemini settings tweaks to protect your privacy from AI
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