Gemini 2.0 arrives, framed for "the agentic era"

Google announced Gemini 2.0, positioning it as a model for "the agentic era," and rolled out an experimental Gemini 2.0 Flash globally across selected products. Multimodal, it could generate images and speak in a range of voices, with users able to ask it to talk faster or slower, and Google said it ran twice as fast as Gemini 1.5 Pro while performing better. Alongside came Project Mariner, a research prototype that reads what is on a browser screen — pixels, text, code, images, forms — and completes tasks through an experimental Chrome extension, scoring a then-best 83.5% as a single agent on WebVoyager, a benchmark of real-world web tasks. Other agent prototypes including the coding tool Jules were shown at the same time, making clear the industry's shift from AI that answers to AI that acts.