As the world’s computer giants compete to lead the rapidly evolving field, Google has announced the release of Gemini 2.0, its most sophisticated artificial intelligence model to date.

CEO Sundar Pichai explained the new model would mark what the company calls “a new agentic era” in AI development, with AI models designed to understand and make decisions about the world around you.

“Gemini 2.0 is about making information much more useful,” Pichai explained in the announcement, emphasizing the model’s enhanced ability to understand context, think multiple steps ahead and take supervised actions on behalf of users.

The announcement caused Google stock to leap by almost 4% on Wall Street, only one day after the company’s stock had already risen 3.5% following the debut of a revolutionary quantum processor.

Despite their high cost and some doubts about their immediate value to the economy as a whole, the tech titans are frantically moving to produce more potent AI models.

The most recent Silicon Valley fad is an AI “agent,” a digital assistant designed to perceive its environment, make decisions, and act to accomplish predetermined objectives.

The 2022 release of ChatGPT, which went viral, set off an AI revolution that the tech giants say will see agents as the next step.

With ambitions for wider integration throughout Google’s products, especially in Search and the Gemini platform, Gemini 2.0 is first being made available to developers and trusted testers.

Google’s sixth-generation TPU (Tensor Processing Unit) hardware, known as Trillium, which the corporation has now made widely accessible to consumers, powers the technology.

Chip giant Nvidia, which has been boosted by the AI explosion to become one of the most valuable businesses in the world, has monopolised the majority of AI training.