Google is releasing an updated version of Gemini 2.5 Pro ahead of its Google I/O conference later this month that it says will have significantly improved coding capabilities. Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview I/O Edition is especially good at "building compelling interactive web apps," the company said in a press release on Tuesday. It's an area with intense competition among Google and its AI rivals.
In February, Google released Gemini's free Code Assistant, a model that offered "practically unlimited" use at 180,000 completions a month. But to get the maximum out of it, users would have had to code for 14 hours a day every day. The coding assistant in Gemini 2.5 Pro is a more powerful option, and Gemini 2.5 Pro now leads on the WebDev Arena Leaderboard, surpassing its previous version.
Google, Anthropic, Meta and ChatGPT maker OpenAI have all been trading blows to be No. 1 on benchmark leaderboards. For tech companies, it's a solid indicator of who's dominating in that arena and fuels future funding and development. There's been criticism, however, that benchmark tools aren't indicative of real-world effectiveness and that Big Tech companies have been tuning artificial intelligence models for benchmark rankings instead of how actual people use AI.
Some experts are calling for AI companies to use different standards when benchmarking, not focusing so much on graduate-level analysis or abstract math, but rather parameters that test real-world needs. Still, the leaderboard competition does give consumers and enterprise customers some indication of how various AI models stack up.
"We're excited about the latest Gemini 2.5 Pro, which builds on its already strong real-world coding capabilities," said Tulsee Doshi, senior director of product management for Gemini, in a statement. "We're observing internally that the new model has a significant reduction in its failure to call tools, an improvement we believe our users will find makes 2.5 Pro even more effective than before in Cursor."
Cursor is an AI-powered coding environment for computers. Google says it has received "overwhelmingly positive feedback" for Gemini 2.5 Pro. Users on Reddit, meanwhile, report that Gemini 2.5 Pro still has a mind of its own and cannot follow instruction.