AI: Google in AI Reasoning race too. RTZ #575

...OpenAI and Google to watch in AI reasoning and agents, direct and via APIs

As I explained yesterday, the current AI is to to get AI ‘reasoning agents’ working for both consumers and businesses. A race that was kicked off by OpenAI earlier this year with their ‘Level 2’ AI Reasoning’ product o1, which went into wide availbility this month. These of course are the next levels from Level 1 Chatbots like ChatGPT on the road to AGI, that the world is now familiar with for over two years this AI Tech Wave.

A whole host of OpenAI rivals are racing towards AI reasoning and agents as well, including Google, also as discussed before,

As Techcrunch reports today, “Google releases its own ‘reasoning’ AI model”:

“Google has released what it’s calling a new “reasoning” AI model — but it’s in the experimental stages, and from our brief testing, there’s certainly room for improvement.”

“The new model, called Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental (a mouthful, to be sure), is available in AI Studio, Google’s AI prototyping platform. A model card describes it as “best for multimodal understanding, reasoning, and coding,” with the ability to “reason over the most complex problems” in fields such as programming, math, and physics.”

“In a post on X, Logan Kilpatrick, who leads product for AI Studio, called Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental “the first step in [Google’s] reasoning journey.” Jeff Dean, chief scientist for Google DeepMind, Google’s AI research division, said in his own post that Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental is “trained to use thoughts to strengthen its reasoning.”

“We see promising results when we increase inference time computation,” Dean said, referring to the amount of computing used to “run” the model as it considers a question.”

The paths to scaling AI reasoning are similar to those taken by OpenAI and others:

“Built on Google’s recently announced Gemini 2.0 Flash model, Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental appears to be similar in design to OpenAI’s o1 and other so-called reasoning models. Unlike most AI, reasoning models effectively fact-check themselves, which helps them avoid some of the pitfalls that normally trip up AI models.”

“As a drawback, reasoning models often take longer — usually seconds to minutes longer — to arrive at solutions.”

“Given a prompt, Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental pauses before responding, considering a number of related prompts and “explaining” its reasoning along the way. After a while, the model summarizes what it considers to be the most accurate answer.”

Again, this Google release is the latest in a the AI industry’s focus on reasoning and agents:

“In the wake of the release of o1, there’s been an explosion of reasoning models from rival AI labs — not just Google. In early November, DeepSeek, an AI research company funded by quant traders, launched a preview of its first reasoning model, DeepSeek-R1. That same month, Alibaba’s Qwen team unveiled what it claimed was the first “open” challenger to o1.”

“Bloomberg reported in October that Google had several teams developing reasoning models. Subsequent reporting by The Information in November revealed that the company has at least 200 researchers focusing on the technology.”

Consider all the current reasoning and agentic developments as exciting building blocks from which we will see truly useful, mainstream AI applications and services next year and beyond. It all kicks off the next level of scalable AI utility of this AI Tech Wave.

The technical innovations under the hood by these companies are potentially more impressive than the LLM AIs we’ve seen to date.

It may all take a bit longer than we like, but the AI Scaling efforts to next level functionality has begun. And Google has a strong suite of cards to play. Stay tuned.

(NOTE: The discussions here are for information purposes only, and not meant as investment advice at any time. Thanks for joining us here)