Gemini 2.0 Flash, generally available January 30, 2025 after a December 2024 preview, was the launch model of what Google called the agentic era: native tool use, multimodal output including image generation and steerable text-to-speech, and a Multimodal Live API for real-time audio and video streaming — all at Flash-tier latency and pricing.

Unusually, Google led the 2.0 generation with its workhorse model rather than its flagship; 2.0 Flash outperformed the previous-generation 1.5 Pro while costing far less, and it powered the first wave of Google's agent prototypes. The 2.0 line filled out with Flash-Lite and Pro within a week, but was quickly eclipsed by the thinking-native Gemini 2.5 family in March 2025.