Google Gemini 1.5 (previously Google Bard) might get a successor in December

Announced in early December 2023, Google's Gemini family of multimodal large language models consists of Gemini Ultra. Gemini Pro, Gemini Flash, and Gemini Nano. Powering the chatbot that carries the same name but was known as Google Bard since early February of the same year, when it rolled out to 10,000 testers for less than a month of trials before its general release, Gemini has to compete with ChatGPT, Copilot, and many others. If everything goes as planned, version 2.0 should arrive this December.

For now, Google Gemini's stable releases are 1.5 for the model, dated May 14th, and 1.0 build 668480831 for the Android app, which was unleashed less than two months ago, on August 29th (but also received a few language updates on October 1st while keeping the same build number). Back in June, Google released a free and open-source family of LLMs based on Gemini. Named Gemma, this lightweight Gemini flavor is already at version 2. Obviously, this doesn't mean it is based on Gemini 2.0. The latest updates to the Gemini family of models arrived last month with the arrival of Gemini-1.5-Pro-002 and Gemini-1.5-Flash-002 on September 24th.

Sadly, Gemini 2.0 remains a mystery for now, although sources familiar with Google's inner workings have recently revealed to The Verge that this upcoming model would arrive in December, when OpenAI was also supposed to unleash its next flagship AI model. However, since Sam Altman has recently denied that rumor, Google might take advantage of this and release its next-gen AI model at least a few weeks prior to the arrival of its main competitor.

In terms of features and capabilities, one can only assume that Google Gemini 2.0 will take one more step in the direction of everyone's goal, namely to gain reasoning abilities that would at least match, if not exceed, human ones. Obviously, the Android app will get the needed retouches to fully support the advancements of the model.

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