Everyone can now try Gemini 2.5 Pro - for free

Moments after DeepSeek released its latest model, another AI giant has already stolen back some of the limelight. 

On 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." 

Also: I tried ChatGPT's new Advanced Voice Mode update - here's what changed

A family of thinking models, meaning they reason through their responses, the release follows Google's Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking, which landed in December.

Most notably, Gemini 2.5 Pro Experimental outperformed 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%. 

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." 

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. 

On Saturday, Google posted on X that Gemini 2.5 Pro is now available to all Gemini users "with rate limits," after an initially more narrow release, and will be coming to mobile soon. Users can try it today at gemini.google.com. 

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.

Want more stories about AI? Sign up for Innovation, our weekly newsletter.