Gemini 2.0 Flash

Gemini 2.0 Flash was announced on December 11, 2024 as the first model of Google's Gemini 2.0 generation, which Google framed as the start of an 'agentic era' of models that take autonomous multi-step actions. It shipped with native tool use — code execution, Google Search grounding, and function calling — plus multimodal outputs including generated images and text-to-speech audio alongside text. Twice as fast as Gemini 1.5 Pro at launch, it became generally available on February 5, 2025 and powered early agentic products including Deep Research for Gemini Advanced users.

The honest picture: it is closed and API-only — no weights, no self-hosting — and it has been superseded by Gemini 2.5 Flash and Gemini 3 for frontier quality. Pricing and rate limits are Google's to change. But as a fast, cheap, tool-using multimodal model with a 1M-token context, it defined the price-performance tier that later Flash models iterated on, and it remains widely deployed in production agent pipelines.