Google flexes AI muscle with Gemini 2.5 Pro updates – who doesn't love higher prompt limits?

AI models improve in a positive feedback loop: Every user interaction provides more data to sharpen the model’s output, leading to a better user experience and more frequent prompting, which in turn leads to better outputs, and so on.

Gemini, Google’s flagship generative AI model, has been riding this upward curve for quite a while. Now, some new updates to the model are signaling that Google is becoming a more confident competitor in the AI race.

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Go ahead, ask more questions

Gemini App leader Josh Woodward announced in an X post Wednesday that paid subscribers to Gemini 2.5 Pro will now be able to submit up to 100 prompts to the model per day, up from the original limit of 50.

Google introduced Gemini 2.5 Pro in March, describing it as the company’s “most advanced model for complex tasks.” Like OpenAI’s o3 and DeepSeek’s R1, Gemini 2.5 Pro is a “reasoning” model, so-called because it can analytically work through problems in a series of steps before providing its responses.

Gemini 2.5 Pro was a major focus at Google I/O 2025, the company’s annual developer conference last month. During the conference, Google announced that the model was being updated with “an experimental, enhanced reasoning mode for highly complex math and coding” called “Deep Think.”

Powerful models like Gemini and GPT-4 — which powers ChatGPT — require a huge amount of data and electricity to function. As a result, their developers will often limit the number of queries that users can ask per day to prevent computational overload. Imposing a daily query limit can also be a safety measure to ensure that new and experimental models don’t veer into hallucinatory territory (which can be embarrassing and harmful to brands’ reputations). 

Google’s doubled daily query limit for Gemini 2.5 Pro signals that the company is confident in its new model’s capabilities and that demand is continuing to rise: The Gemini App reportedly had more than 400 monthly active users as of late May; it still hasn’t reached ChatGPT usage levels, but it’s getting closer.

Talk to me

One day before Woodward’s X post, Google also elaborated on some audio features that had been initially unveiled a couple of weeks ago at I/O.

Gemini 2.5 Flash preview — an early iteration of a smaller, more nimble version of Gemini 2.5 — is now able to engage in conversation that feels more natural and realistic, right down to subtle details like intonation and laughter. Users can access the 2.5 Flash preview through Google AI Studio, Vertex AI, or the Gemini App. 

Also: The pressure is on for quick AI rollouts – but slow and steady wins this race too

Companies like Hume, which recently released the third iteration of its Empathic Voice Interface model, are also making advancements in this area.

Users of Gemini 2.5 Pro and Flash preview now have much more creative freedom when generating text-to-speech (TTS) outputs. The models can be prompted, for example, to generate voices with specific emotions or expressive styles.

“We believe conversation will be a key way we interact with AI,” Google wrote in a company press release.

Google AI ascendent 

Like virtually every other tech giant in Silicon Valley, Google was blindsided by the sudden release of ChatGPT in late 2022. At the time, it was widely regarded as a revolutionary moment for the industry. Since then, Google’s been racing to catch up. 

But whereas a couple of years ago Google’s generative AI efforts seemed like a thinly veiled effort to follow in the footsteps of OpenAI, its recent breakthroughs have given it a new air of dominance and confidence in the ongoing AI race. As its models continue to improve, so too will its competitive edge.

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(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, ZDNET’s parent company, filed an April 2025 lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)

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