Google’s most advanced AI model now free with limited features

Google has rapidly made its most advanced AI model available to all users, shifting its strategy to balance accessibility with premium features. The latest iteration brings significant improvements in reasoning capabilities and performance, positioning Google more competitively in the increasingly crowded AI assistant market while still maintaining incentives for paid subscriptions through usage limitations.

The big picture: Google has released Gemini 2.5 Pro (Experimental) to free users just days after making it available to paying subscribers, marking an unusually quick rollout of advanced AI technology.

• The model represents a significant upgrade over Gemini 2.0, which was only released in late 2024, and features improved simulated reasoning capabilities.
• This version of Gemini has already topped the LMSYS Chatbot arena leaderboard, suggesting Google may be closing the perceived quality gap with competitors.

Key details: Free users can immediately access the model on the web by selecting it from a drop-down menu, with mobile app availability coming soon.

• The free version maintains most core functionalities but lacks file upload capabilities and has an unspecified lower context window limit compared to the full 1 million-token window available to subscribers.
• Google has implemented usage rate limits for free users, which can be exhausted after just a few complex prompts and require approximately three hours to reset.

Why this matters: This rapid deployment suggests Google is becoming more aggressive in its AI strategy, potentially signaling increased confidence in its latest models after previously playing catch-up to OpenAI.

• The company appears to be balancing wider accessibility to advanced AI with maintaining incentives for paid subscriptions through strategic feature limitations.

What’s next: Given the pace of this rollout, Google is likely to soon distill Gemini 2.5 into a smaller Flash model that will become the default for everyday tasks.