Gemini 2.5 Pro is so good that it is Empire Strikes Back moment in AI fight between Google and OpenAI
At a time when OpenAI and its ChatGPT models have hogged all the limelight it is easy to forget that Google is the OG in AI. The company has been at it for over a decade, with its AI efforts largely spearheaded by researchers at DeepMind. In fact, the current AI revolution and breakthroughs are a direct result of a paper — and which has now attained a mythical reputation — called Attention Is All You Need. The paper was written by Google researchers. And yet, when we think of AI we think of OpenAI and ChatGPT. With Google Gemini 2.5 Pro, the latest model from the tech giant, this is changing. advertisementThe reason why OpenAI has hogged all the limelight is because it has been better at turning AI research into actual products. While Google has been the lab leader, OpenAI has been better at bringing its AI tools to the public. Google, in a way, was caught off-guard by ChatGPT 3 in 2022. The company scrambled to respond, and in a furry even ended up making a few mistakes. Its initial challenges to the GPT 3 were not good at all. In 2025, to use a much-cliched phrase, the Empire Is Striking Back. And it is doing so with the Gemini 2.5 Pro (experimental).
Since it arrived on the scene a few weeks ago, the Gemini 2.5 Pro (experimental) has wowed its users. This is the first AI system from Google that feels as good as — and in many instances better — than the best tools available from OpenAI. And whether in actual use, or in benchmarks, the Gemini 2.5 Pro has excelled. Take a look at the benchmarks:
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But more than the benchmarks the new Gemini has impressed users. Social media — mostly X aka Twitter because that is where action is — nowadays is full of thumbs ups from people saying how Gemini 2.5 Pro excels at coding, or writing, or analysing documents. Unlike the recent ChatGPT 4o, which turned into a parrot eulogising and flattering its users, the Gemini has a measured tone and a more authoritative personality. It does not by any means sound unhelpful. Instead, it is measured in a way a professional helper would be. When I try an AI tool like Gemini, DeepSeek or ChatGPT, I usually ask it to write a paragraph or two in the style of Jon Fosse. Now, Fosse is a writer — and here I am talking of his work translated in English — who uses a minimalistic language and a sparse voice, but one which gets its force from the way the Norwegian writer creates rhythm with repetitions. For AI, coding is easy nowadays. It excels at logic. But writing a few lines of fiction is still a difficult job for it. And on that, it is very difficult for an AI tool to write a paragraph that reflects the style used by Fosse. They can write in Hemingway style — well, sort of — but not Fosse. In my experience, so far the only AI tool that has managed some sort of coherency in this has been the Gemini 2.5 Pro. advertisementThere is another reason why the Gemini 2.5 Pro is such a key AI tool. Unlike the best tools from the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic, the Gemini 2.5 Pro is free to use. In this aspect it is somewhat like DeepSeek R1. But unlike DeepSeek R1, which often found itself getting a hammering due to load on its servers, Gemini 2.5 Pro can probably handle millions of users simultaneously. The backend that powers Google services is one of the best, if not the absolute best, that any tech company has. In many ways, this makes the Gemini 2.5 Pro the first top-class AI model that most people in the world can use.Now as good as the Gemini 2.5 Pro is, there is another aspect to it, and that is how Google vs OpenAI is going to look like in future. So far it seemed that OpenAI was landing all the blows. But I have a suspicion that the Gemini 2.5 Pro is just the beginning of a counter strike. Google has some of the best AI researchers. It also has the kind of data that other companies can only dream of. And finally it has a massive scale — in everything — which OpenAI currently doesn't have.advertisementGoogle still needs to get better at showing its AI tools to people. For example, its NotebookLLM, which can turn a paragraph into a long podcast, is superb. Similarly, there are a number of other Gemini and Google AI tools that are top class in what they do. But they remain scattered across Google services and products, and in many cases accessing them requires — like literally — an engineering degree because Google has placed them in virtual silos that are accessible only to developers. But I feel these are the niggles that a company like Google will sort out in the coming months. The new Gemini interface in itself is a big improvement in terms of accessibility and user experience compared to what we had a year ago. A more pressing matter for Google was to prove that it could match ChatGPT and Claude. With the Gemini 2.5 Pro it has done that.
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