Google Releases Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking — Free Reasoning Model That Beats o1-mini

In one sentence Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking shows its chain-of-thought reasoning, outperforms o1-mini on AIME and GPQA, and is free in Google AI Studio — Google's first reasoning model on par with OpenAI's o-series at a fraction of the cost.

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Google released a new version of Gemini called Flash Thinking that can show its work — it reasons through problems step by step and lets you see the thinking process before it gives a final answer. This approach, similar to what OpenAI pioneered with their o1 model, makes AI dramatically better at mathematics, science, and complex logic. Surprisingly, this model is available completely free in Google AI Studio. Despite being free, it outperforms OpenAI's o1-mini on two hard benchmarks: AIME (advanced mathematics competition problems) and GPQA (PhD-level science questions). This was significant because it showed Google could match OpenAI's reasoning capabilities at a fraction of the cost, and that frontier-level AI reasoning did not have to be expensive. It accelerated competition in the reasoning model space substantially.