Google released the first version of its Gemini 2.0 family of artificial intelligence models on Wednesday.
Gemini 2.0 Flash, as the model is called, is available in a chat version for users globally while an experimental multimodal version of the model, with text-to-speech and image generation features, is available to developers.
“If Gemini 1.0 was about organizing and understanding information, Gemini 2.0 is about making it much more useful,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in a statement.
Google’s latest large language model outperforms its predecessors in the majority of user request areas, such as code generation and the ability to provide factually correct responses from user requests. One area where it is inferior to Gemini 1.5 Pro is when it comes to evaluating longer contexts.
To access the chat-optimized version of the experimental Flash 2.0, Gemini users can select it in the model drop-down menu on desktop and mobile web. It will be available on the Gemini mobile app soon, the company said.
The multimodal version of Gemini Flash 2.0 will be available via the Google’s AI Studio and Vertex AI developer platforms.
General availability of Gemini 2.0 Flash’s multimodal version will come in January, along with more Gemini 2.0 model sizes, Google said Wednesday. The company said it also plans to expand Gemini 2.0 to more Google products in early 2025.
Gemini 2.0 represents Google’s latest efforts in the tech industry’s increasingly competitive AI race. Google is competing against the likes of rivals like tech giants Microsoft and Meta and startups like OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, Perplexity and Anthropic, which makes Claude.
Along with the release of the new Flash model are other research prototypes aimed at developing more “agentic” AI models and experiences. Agentic models, according to the company, “can understand more about the world around you, think multiple steps ahead, and take action on your behalf, with your supervision.”
Last week, in a conversation with Andrew Ross Sorkin at The New York Times’ DealBook Summit, Pichai challenged Microsoft’s AI advancement, saying he’d “love to do a side-by-side comparison” of the two companies’ models “any day, any time.”
Alphabet and Tesla climbed to fresh records on Wednesday, closing at all-time highs alongside Amazon and Meta as the tech megacaps lifted the Nasdaq past 20,000 for the first time.
Tech’s seven trillion-dollar companies added roughly $416 billion in market cap for the day.
For Alphabet, the two-day 11% rally was driven by the company’s launch of its latest quantum computing chip, which it revealed on Monday and described as a “breakthrough” and “an important step in our journey to build a useful quantum computer with practical applications” in drug discovery, battery design and other areas.
Alphabet closed at $195.40 on Wednesday, topping its prior high of $191.18, which it reached on July 10.
Tesla had been below its previous record for much longer. Shares of the electric vehicle maker jumped almost 6% on Wednesday to $424.77, climbing above their prior closing high of $409.97 on Nov. 4, 2021. The stock has soared 69% since Donald Trump’s election victory last month, on Wall Street’s optimism that Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s cozy relationship with the incoming president will pay dividends.
Amazon, Apple and Meta have all been regularly reaching new highs, though Apple slipped 0.5% on Wednesday. Microsoft, meanwhile, is about 4% below its high reached in July, and chipmaker Nvidia is 6% off its record from last month.
The outsized weighting of tech’s megacaps has pushed the Nasdaq to a 33% gain for the year. The index rose 1.8% on Wednesday to close at an all-time high of 20,034.89.
The market has rallied since Trump’s victory on Nov. 4, partly on expectations that the new administration will dial down regulatory pressure on the tech industry and allow for more dealmaking.
On Tuesday, Trump named Andrew Ferguson as the next chair of the Federal Trade Commission, replacing Lina Khan, who is best known for blocking the top tech companies’ acquisition efforts. Ferguson, currently one of the FTC’s five commissioners, “will be the most America First, and pro-innovation FTC Chair in our Country’s History,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post.
Tom Lee, managing partner at Fundstrat Global Advisors, told CNBC’s “Closing Bell” that investors see more gains in tech with the expectation that a Federal Reserve rate cut is coming this month. The consumer price index showed a 12-month inflation rate of 2.7% in November, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on Wednesday, further solidifying the market outlook for a cut.
“We know that when interest rates fall, the megacaps actually are very sensitive to that, and I think today was a day where the odds of a December cut increased,” Lee said. “That’s actually bullish for tech.”
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta Platforms, during the Meta Connect event in Menlo Park, California, on Sept. 25, 2024.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Meta’s family of apps including Facebook and Instagram were down on Wednesday, resulting in users being unable to access the services.
The widespread outages began around 9:57 a.m. PST and affected the social media company’s core apps as well as Threads, WhatsApp and Messenger, according to user-submitted reports gathered by the internet-monitoring site Downdetector.
More than 100,000 users experienced problems using the Facebook service at 10:11 a.m. PST, representing the peak of the outages, according to Downdetector.
Meta acknowledged the outage via a post on social media site X, saying =the company is “aware that a technical issue is impacting some users’ ability to access our apps.”
“We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible and apologize for any inconvenience,” the X post said.
A separate Instagram-specific X post also acknowledged the outage, and said the company recognizes “there’s a technical issue impacting some people’s ability to access Instagram.”
Meta’s various apps experienced a roughly two-hour outage in March 2024, on the same day as the Super Tuesday U.S. presidential primaries.
U.S. President-elect Donald Trump and Elon Musk watch the launch of the sixth test flight of the SpaceX Starship rocket in Brownsville, Texas, on Nov. 19, 2024.
Brandon Bell | Via Reuters
Tesla shares jumped to an all-time high on Wednesday, surpassing their prior record reached in 2021, sparked by a post-election rally and Wall Street’s increased enthusiasm for Elon Musk’s electric vehicle company.
The stock rose to an intraday high of $415, which is 50 cents above its previous peak, and was on pace to close ahead of its highest finish, which was $409.97 on Nov. 4, 2021.
Tesla’s market value has swelled by about 66% this year, with almost all of those gains coming since Donald Trump’s election victory early last month. The stock’s 38% rally in November marked its best monthly performance since January of 2023 and its 10th best on record.
Musk poured $277 million into a pro-Trump campaign effort, according to Federal Election Commission filings, and turned his support for the Republican nominee into another full-time job ahead of the election, funding a swing-state operation to register voters and using his social media platform X to constantly tout his preferred candidate, frequently with misinformation.
The world’s richest person, who’s seen his net worth swell to over $360 billion, is set to lead the Trump administration’s “Department of Government Efficiency,” alongside onetime Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy.
His new role could give Musk power over federal agencies’ budgets, staffing and the ability to push for the elimination of inconvenient regulations. Musk said during a Tesla earnings call in October that he intended to use his sway with Trump to establish a “federal approval process for autonomous vehicles.” Currently, approvals happen at the state level.
“The stock is responding to the Trump bump,” Craig Irwin, an analyst at Roth MKM, told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” last week. Irwin had just increased his price target to $380 from $85, writing in a report that “Musk’s authentic support for Trump likely doubled Tesla’s pool of enthusiasts and lifted credibility for a demand inflection.”
On Wednesday, analysts at Goldman Sachs boosted their price target on Tesla, joining a parade of firms that have lifted their price expectation or their rating on the stock. The Goldman analysts wrote that “the market is taking a more forward-looking approach to Tesla, including with respect to its AI opportunity.”
Analysts at Morgan Stanley and Bank of America have also issued bullish reports of late.
Since Trump’s victory, Musk has been accompanying the president-elect in meetings with world leaders, and began advising him and members of Congress as to which federal agencies, regulations and budget items the billionaire would like to eliminate or greatly reduce.
Tesla’s surge to a record marks a dramatic turn from its performance to start the year. The company’s shares plunged 29% in the first three months of 2024, the worst quarter for the stock since the end of 2022 and the third worst since Tesla went public in 2010. At the time, investors were concerned about Tesla’s core business, which reported declining revenue in the first quarter in part due to increased competition from China.
In its third-quarter earnings report in October, Tesla reported a year-over-year revenue increase of 8%, which fell just shy of estimates. However, the company reported better-than-expected profit, and Musk said on the earnings call that his “best guess” is that “vehicle growth” will reach 20% to 30% next year, due to “lower cost vehicles” and the “advent of autonomy.” That forecast was ahead of analysts’ predictions.