Greetings from Terminal 8 at JFK. I'm heading down to Austin to speak at the 2025 ANA AI and Technology for Marketers Conference. LMK if you're going to be there.
In the news: Google unveiled Gemini 2.5 yesterday, marking their most significant advancement in AI reasoning models to date. The new family of AI models pauses to "think" before answering questions – a capability that puts Google in feature parity with OpenAI's "o" series, Deepseek's R series, Anthropic, xAI, and other reasoning models.
Gemini 2.5 Pro Experimental, the first model in this new lineup, is available now in Google AI Studio for developers and through the Gemini app for Advanced subscribers ($20/month). Google claims it's their "most intelligent model yet" and that it outperforms competing offerings on several benchmarks.
The massive context window is a big deal. Gemini 2.5 Pro ships with a 1 million token context window (approximately 750,000 words), with an expansion to two million tokens coming soon. This allows the model to process entire code repositories or datasets in a single prompt, providing significant advantages for enterprise applications. For context, you could put the entire works of Shakespeare (under 700,000 tokens) in a single prompt with room to spare.
According to Google's blog, Gemini 2.5 leads the LMArena leaderboard "by a significant margin" and demonstrates enhanced performance in coding, math, and science benchmarks. The model excels particularly at creating web apps and handling agentic coding applications, scoring 68.6% on the Aider Polyglot code editing evaluation.
Going forward, Google plans to incorporate reasoning capabilities into all future AI models, laying groundwork for more capable, context-aware AI agents.
The great thing about this is that we (AI users) are the beneficiaries of this enduring AI arms race. The models get more capable everyday. The hardest part is keeping up with the new features.
As always your thoughts and comments are both welcome and encouraged. Just reply to this email. -s
Shelly Palmer is the Professor of Advanced Media in Residence at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications and CEO of The Palmer Group, a consulting practice that helps Fortune 500 companies with technology, media and marketing. Named LinkedIn’s “Top Voice in Technology,” he covers tech and business for Good Day New York, is a regular commentator on CNN and writes a popular daily business blog. He's a bestselling author, and the creator of the popular, free online course, Generative AI for Execs. Follow @shellypalmer or visit shellypalmer.com.
