Gemini (language model)
Gemini is a family of multimodal large language models developed by Google DeepMind, and the successor to LaMDA and PaLM 2. Comprising Gemini Pro, Gemini Deep Think, Gemini Flash, and Gemini Flash Lite, it was announced on December 6, 2023. It powers the chatbot of the same name.
History
Development
announced Gemini, a large language model developed by subsidiary Google DeepMind, during the Google I/O keynote on May 10, 2023. It was positioned as a more powerful successor to PaLM 2, which was also unveiled at the event, with Google CEO Sundar Pichai stating that Gemini was still in its early developmental stages. Unlike other LLMs, Gemini was said to be unique in that it was not trained on a text corpus alone and was designed to be multimodal, meaning it could process multiple types of data simultaneously, including text, images, audio, video, and computer code. It had been developed as a collaboration between DeepMind and Google Brain, two branches of Google that had been merged as Google DeepMind. In an interview with Wired, DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis touted Gemini's advanced capabilities, which he believed would allow the algorithm to trump OpenAI's ChatGPT, which runs on GPT-4 and whose growing popularity had been aggressively challenged by Google with LaMDA and Bard. Hassabis highlighted the strengths of DeepMind's AlphaGo program, which gained worldwide attention in 2016 when it defeated Go champion Lee Sedol, saying that Gemini would combine the power of AlphaGo and other Google–DeepMind LLMs.In August 2023, The Information published a report outlining Google's roadmap for Gemini, revealing that the company was targeting a launch date of late 2023. According to the report, Google hoped to surpass OpenAI and other competitors by combining conversational text capabilities present in most LLMs with artificial intelligence–powered image generation, allowing it to create contextual images and be adapted for a wider range of use cases. Like Bard, Google co-founder Sergey Brin was summoned out of retirement to assist in the development of Gemini, along with hundreds of other engineers from Google Brain and DeepMind; he was later credited as a "core contributor" to Gemini. Because Gemini was being trained on transcripts of YouTube videos, lawyers were brought in to filter out any potentially copyrighted materials.
With news of Gemini's impending launch, OpenAI hastened its work on integrating GPT-4 with multimodal features similar to those of Gemini. The Information reported in September that several companies had been granted early access to "an early version" of the LLM, which Google intended to make available to clients through Google Cloud's Vertex AI service. The publication also stated that Google was arming Gemini to compete with both GPT-4 and Microsoft's GitHub Copilot.
Launch
On December 6, 2023, Pichai and Hassabis announced "Gemini 1.0" at a virtual press conference. It comprised three models: Gemini Ultra, designed for "highly complex tasks"; Gemini Pro, designed for "a wide range of tasks"; and Gemini Nano, designed for "on-device tasks". At launch, Gemini Pro and Nano were integrated into Bard and the Pixel 8 Pro smartphone, respectively, while Gemini Ultra was set to power "Bard Advanced" and become available to software developers in early 2024. Other products that Google intended to incorporate Gemini into included Search, Ads, Chrome, Duet AI on Google Workspace, and AlphaCode 2. It was made available only in English. Touted as Google's "largest and most capable AI model" and designed to emulate human behavior, the company stated that Gemini would not be made widely available until the following year due to the need for "extensive safety testing". Gemini was trained on and powered by Google's Tensor Processing Units, and the name is in reference to the DeepMind–Google Brain merger as well as NASA's Project Gemini.Gemini Ultra was said to have outperformed GPT-4, Anthropic's Claude 2, Inflection AI's Inflection-2, Meta's LLaMA 2, and xAI's Grok 1 on a variety of industry benchmarks, while Gemini Pro was said to have outperformed GPT-3.5. Gemini Ultra was also the first language model to outperform human experts on the 57-subject Massive Multitask Language Understanding test, obtaining a score of 90%. Gemini Pro was made available to Google Cloud customers on AI Studio and Vertex AI on December 13, while Gemini Nano will be made available to Android developers as well. Hassabis further revealed that DeepMind was exploring how Gemini could be "combined with robotics to physically interact with the world". In accordance with an executive order signed by U.S. President Joe Biden in October, Google stated that it would share testing results of Gemini Ultra with the federal government of the United States. Similarly, the company was engaged in discussions with the government of the United Kingdom to comply with the principles laid out at the AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park in November.
In June 2025, Google introduced Gemini CLI, an open-source AI agent that brings the capabilities of Gemini directly to the terminal, offering advanced coding, automation, and problem-solving features with generous free usage limits for individual developers.
Updates
Google partnered with Samsung to integrate Gemini Nano and Gemini Pro into its Galaxy S24 smartphone lineup in January 2024. The following month, Bard and Duet AI were unified under the Gemini brand, with "Gemini Advanced with Ultra 1.0" debuting via a new "AI Premium" tier of the Google One subscription service. Gemini Pro also received a global launch.In February 2024, Google launched Gemini 1.5 in a limited capacity, positioned as a more powerful and capable model than 1.0 Ultra. This "step change" was achieved through various technical advancements, including a new architecture, a mixture-of-experts approach, and a larger one-million-token context window, which equates to roughly an hour of silent video, 11 hours of audio, 30,000 lines of code, or 700,000 words. The same month, Google debuted Gemma, a family of free and open-source LLMs that serve as a lightweight version of Gemini. They came in two sizes, with a neural network with two and seven billion parameters, respectively. Multiple publications viewed this as a response to Meta and others open-sourcing their AI models, and a stark reversal from Google's longstanding practice of keeping its AI proprietary. Google announced an additional model, Gemini 1.5 Flash, on May 14 at the 2024 I/O keynote.
Two updated Gemini models, Gemini-1.5-Pro-002 and Gemini-1.5-Flash-002, were released on September 24, 2024.
On December 11, 2024, Google announced Gemini 2.0 Flash Experimental, a significant update to its Gemini AI model. This iteration boasts improved speed and performance over its predecessor, Gemini 1.5 Flash. Key features include a Multimodal Live API for real-time audio and video interactions, enhanced spatial understanding, native image and controllable text-to-speech generation, and integrated tool use, including Google Search. It also introduces improved agentic capabilities, a new Google Gen AI SDK, and "Jules," an experimental AI coding agent for GitHub. Additionally, Google Colab is integrating Gemini 2.0 to generate data science notebooks from natural language. Gemini 2.0 was available through the Gemini chat interface for all users as "Gemini 2.0 Flash experimental".
On January 30, 2025, Google released Gemini 2.0 Flash as the new default model, with Gemini 1.5 Flash still available for usage. This was followed by the release of Gemini 2.0 Pro on February 5, 2025. Additionally, Google released Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental, which details the language model's thinking process when responding to prompts.
On March 12, 2025, Google also announced Gemini Robotics, a vision-language-action model based on the Gemini 2.0 family of models.
The next day, Google announced that Gemini in Android Studio would be able to understand simple UI mockups and transform them into working Jetpack Compose code.
Gemini 2.5 Pro Experimental was released on March 25, 2025, described by Google as its most intelligent AI model yet, featuring enhanced reasoning and coding capabilities, and a "thinking model" capable of reasoning through steps before responding, using techniques like chain-of-thought prompting, whilst maintaining native multimodality and launching with a 1 million token context window.
At Google I/O 2025, Google announced significant updates to its Gemini core models. Gemini 2.5 Flash became the default model, delivering faster responses. Gemini 2.5 Pro was introduced as the most advanced Gemini model, featuring reasoning, coding capabilities, and the new Deep Think mode for complex tasks. Both 2.5 Pro and Flash support native audio output and improved security.
On June 17, 2025, Google announced general availability for 2.5 Pro and Flash. They also introduced Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite that same day, a model optimized for speed and cost-efficiency.
On November 18, 2025, Google announced the release of 3 Pro and 3 Deep Think. These new models replace 2.5 Pro and Flash, and are the most powerful models available as of November 2025. On release, 3 Pro outperformed major AI models in 19 out of 20 benchmarks tested, including surpassing OpenAI's GPT-5 Pro in Humanity's Last Exam, with an accuracy of 41% compared to OpenAI's 31.64%, and topped the LMArena leaderboard. This reportedly led to OpenAI declaring an internal "code red" in December to catch up to Gemini 3, and hastened the release of a new model named GPT-5.2, which was released on December 11.
On December 4, 2025, Google announced that 3 Deep Think would start rolling out to Ultra subscribers.
On December 17, 2025, Google announced the release of 3 Flash replacing the current version of 2.5 Flash.
On January 12, 2026, Apple has officially partnered with Google to use Google's Gemini AI model as the foundation for the next generation of Apple Foundation models, which will power its upcoming version of Siri.