On Thursday, December 19, Google unveiled its new AI reasoning model called Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking that could rival OpenAI’s much talked about o1 model. While still in the experimental phase, Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking is currently accessible to users through the search giant’s AI studio. Similar to o1, Google’s latest AI model uses runtime reasoning techniques to achieve deeper thinking when users input complex problems to solve. This means that the model pauses to consider other related user prompts before providing an answer that it determined as being the most accurate. “Built on 2.0 Flash’s speed and performance, this model is trained to use thoughts to strengthen its reasoning. And we see promising results when we increase inference time computation!” Jeff Dean, a chief scientist at Google Deepmind, wrote in a post on X. Want to see Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking in action? Check out this demo where the model solves a physics problem and explains its reasoning. pic.twitter.com/Nl0hYj7ZFS — Jeff Dean (@JeffDean) December 19, 2024 Calling it the first step in Google’s reasoning journey, Google AI Studio product lead Logan Kilpatrick posted a screen recorded demo of how Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking handles a challenging puzzle involving both visual and textual clues. It’s still an early version, but check out how the model handles a challenging puzzle involving both visual and textual clues: (2/3) pic.twitter.com/JltHeK7Fo7 — Logan Kilpatrick (@OfficialLoganK) December 19, 2024 What are AI reasoning models? Earlier this year, OpenAI released a new AI model called o1 that uses techniques such as reinforcement learning and chain-of-thought reasoning to carry out step-by-step analysis of a problem before solving it. The launch of o1 was preceded by several months of hype around a secret project that the Sam Altman-led startup was working on code-named Project Strawberry. It kicked off a race among other tech companies, each of whom scrambled to roll out their own reasoning models that took extra seconds or minutes after a user entered their prompt before providing a response. DeepSeek, a China-based AI research company, launched R1 that reasoned through various tasks before arriving at an answer. Meanwhile, Alibaba's Qwen team released its own "reasoning" model called QwQ earlier this month. However, several questions have been raised about the accuracy and real-world applications of AI reasoning models. Additionally, a growing body of research that has been quietly gaining momentum, argues that the only thing LLMs are good at is recognising patterns in data and accurately guessing what words come next in a sentence i.e. probabilistic determination. AI reasoning models also involve higher computing costs which has led some to further question their viability in the long run.
