Google Takes The Lead With Gemini 2.5 Pro

Why Google’s New AI is Leading the Pack & How You Can Use It Today

Choosing the right AI model for the task at hand can mean the difference between frustrating roadblocks and smooth problem-solving. But let’s face it: the AI landscape changes incredibly fast, making it tough to keep track of the latest developments and know which tools are truly the best available.

That’s where resources like the LLM Arena come in handy. It’s a crowdsourced platform where you can compare how various large language models (LLMs) perform on different kinds of tasks, based on blind tests with real users.

The latest results show that Google's brand new Gemini 2.5 Pro has taken the lead:

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And the great thing about Google’s experimental models is the fact that you can try them for free on Google AI studio. (more on that later).

Now, let’s learn more about the model!

About Gemini 2.5 Pro

So what makes the Gemini 2.5 Pro model stand out?

It’s a reasoning model
Natively multimodal
Large context window
Available for free

It’s described as a ‘thinking’ model, meaning it goes through a reasoning process instead of just spitting out an answer instantly. It’s not the first model that takes advantage of the chain of thought technique, but it has currently surpassed the top reasoning models from rivals such as OpenAI (o1 and o3-mini), Anthropic (Sonnet 3.7 thinking), and R1 from Deepseek.

Currently, all of the top models leverage this reasoning process. If you want to understand how it all works in more depth, I highly recommend watching this 3-and-a-half-hour video from Andrej Karpathy that goes into detail on everything from basic LLMs to reasoning models:

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Gemini 2.5 Pro Experimental is also natively multimodal; it can process inputs including text, images, audio, video, and even entire codebases, making it great for various real-life applications that rely on working with different modalities.

It also comes with a large context window of 1 million tokens (2 million coming soon), which is essentially the model’s working memory (explained in detail in the video mentioned above).

How to access Gemini 2.5 Pro?

There are currently 2 ways to access the model:

on the paid tier of the Gemini app
for free on Google AI studio

One of the best things about Google’s new experimental models is that they often make them freely available through Google AI Studio.

Getting started is simple: just sign up for AI Studio, and once you’re in, select the Gemini 2.5 Pro Experimental model from the menu on the right side (as shown below):

Image by HungryMinded

Don’t overlook this valuable resource! Besides giving you access to cutting-edge models like Gemini 2.5 Pro, Google AI Studio also lets you experiment with other tools. You can explore models for generating and editing images, engage in real-time conversations with LLMs while sharing your screen or webcam feed, and much more.

Closing Thoughts

So, what’s the takeaway on Gemini 2.5 Pro? It’s definitely making waves right out of the gate. The benchmarks and its current top spot on rankings like the LLM Arena are certainly impressive. Of course, it’s still early days, and only time and widespread use will truly tell how well it holds up across real-world applications. (Can’t wait to test it in Cursor)

My own initial experience has been positive. I was recently wrestling with a tricky “vibe-coding” issue, and Gemini 2.5 Pro managed to help me find a solution surprisingly quickly. Was it just a lucky break? Maybe, but it left a strong first impression.

The initial experience with this model serves as a solid statement from Google: they are an AI giant that demands attention.

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