This is Gemini era. Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google has just announced, at the Google I/O 2025, the upsurge in the usage, since the launch of the first-generation Gemini Pro model.
“Today, Gemini 2.5 Pro sweeps the LMArena leaderboard in all categories,” he said. “Model progress is enabled by our world-leading infrastructure. Our seventh-generation TPU, Ironwood, is the first designed specifically to power thinking and inferential AI workloads at scale. It delivers 10 times the performance over the previous generation, and packs an incredible 42.5 exaflops compute per pod — just amazing.”
From Pichai’s keynote, it is obvious Google continues to shove more generative AI features into its core products. Its AI Mode, which is what the company is calling a new chatbot, will soon be live in Search for all US users.
AI Mode is in a separate tab and it’s designed to handle more complex queries than people have historically used Search for.
You might use it to compare different fitness trackers or find the most affordable tickets for an upcoming event. AI Mode will soon be able to whip up custom charts and graphics related to your specific queries too. It can also handle follow-up questions.
The chatbot now runs on Gemini 2.5. Google plans to bring some of its features into the core Search experience by injecting them into AI Overviews. Labs users will be the first to get access to the new features before Google rolls them out more broadly.
Meanwhile, AI Mode is powering some new shopping features. You’ll soon be able to upload a single picture of yourself to see what a piece of clothing looks like on a virtual version of you.
Also, similar to the way in which Google Flights keeps an eye out for price drops, Google will be able to let you know when an item you want (in its specific size and color) is on sale for a price you’re willing to pay.
It can even complete the purchase on your behalf if you want.
1.5 billion people see AI Overviews each month
Google told us that AI Overviews, the Gemini-powered summaries that appear at the top of search results and has had plenty of problems, are seen by more than 1.5 billion folks every month.
The “overwhelming majority” of people interact with these in a meaningful way, the company said — this could mean clicking on something in an overview or keeping it on their screen for a while (presumably to read through it).
At Google I/O 2025, the CEO boasted that Gemini 2.5 is here with improved functionality, upgraded security and transparency, extra control and better cost efficiency.
Gemini 2.5 Pro is bolstered by a new enhanced reasoning mode called Deep Think. The model can do things like turn a grid of photos into a 3D sphere of pictures, and then add narration for each image. Gemini 2.5’s text-to-speech feature can also change up languages on the fly.
There’s much more to it than that, of course, and we’ve got more details in our Gemini 2.5 story.
…Key announcements at Google I/O 2025…coming soon
