Google Gemini
Gemini is a family of multimodal generative artificial intelligence models and associated software developed by Google DeepMind. The Gemini large language models are successors to LaMDA and PaLM 2, and are the foundational technology for Google's commercial AI products, including the chatbot named Gemini and features within Google Workspace and Android.
The Gemini architecture is trained natively on multiple data types, allowing the models to process and generate text, computer code, images, audio, and video simultaneously. Google distributes the technology in varying capacities, ranging from efficient on-device versions and cost-effective, high-throughput variants to high-compute models designed for complex reasoning. The 1.5 and 3.0 model generations introduced extended context windows, enabling the analysis of large datasets such as entire codebases, long-form videos, or extensive document archives in a single prompt.
Gemini was first announced on December 6, 2023, and replaced existing Google branding for AI services. In February 2024, the Bard chatbot was renamed Gemini, and the "Duet AI" branding for Google Cloud and Workspace was retired in favor of the Gemini identifier. The models integrate into the Google ecosystem through the Gemini mobile app, which functions as an overlay assistant on Android devices, and through the Vertex AI platform for third-party developers.
The release of Gemini has generated technical praise and public controversy. Commentators have highlighted the models' benchmarks in coding and retrieval tasks as competitive with OpenAI's GPT-4 and GPT-5. However, the product launch faced criticism regarding the reliability of its outputs. In early 2024, Google suspended the model's ability to generate images of people after users reported historical inaccuracies and bias in its depictions of human subjects. Subsequent updates, including the Gemini 1.5 and 3.0 series released throughout 2025, focused on reducing hallucinations, improving latency, and enhancing agentic capabilities for autonomous research and software development.
History
Background
In November 2022, OpenAI launched ChatGPT, a chatbot based on the GPT-3 family of large language models. ChatGPT gained worldwide attention, becoming a viral Internet sensation. Alarmed by ChatGPT's potential threat to Google Search, Google executives issued a "code red" alert, reassigning several teams to assist in the company's artificial intelligence efforts. Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google and parent company Alphabet, was widely reported to have issued the alert, but Pichai later denied this to The New York Times. In a rare move, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who had stepped down from their roles as co-CEOs of Alphabet in 2019, attended emergency meetings with company executives to discuss Google's response to ChatGPT. Brin requested access to Google's code in February 2023, for the first time in years.Google had unveiled LaMDA, a prototype LLM, earlier in 2021, but it was not released to the public. When asked by employees at an all-hands meeting whether LaMDA was a missed opportunity for Google to compete with ChatGPT, Pichai and Google AI chief Jeff Dean said that while the company's chatbot had similar capabilities to ChatGPT, there were risks to introducing an LLM that might spread false information, so they decided to wait. In January 2023, Google Brain's sister company DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis hinted at plans for a ChatGPT rival, and Google employees were instructed to accelerate progress on a ChatGPT competitor, intensively testing "Apprentice Bard" and other chatbots. Pichai assured investors during Google's quarterly earnings investor call in February that the company had plans to expand LaMDA's availability and applications.
Bard
Announcement
On February 6, 2023, Google announced Bard, a generative artificial intelligence chatbot powered by LaMDA. Bard was first rolled out to a select group of 10,000 "trusted testers", before a wide release scheduled at the end of the month. The project was overseen by product lead Jack Krawczyk, who described the product as a "collaborative AI service" rather than a search engine, while Pichai detailed how Bard would be integrated into Google Search. Reuters calculated that adding ChatGPT-like features to Google Search could cost the company $6 billion in additional expenses by 2024, while research and consulting firm SemiAnalysis calculated that it would cost Google $3 billion. The technology was developed under the codename "Atlas", with the name "Bard" in reference to the Celtic term for a storyteller and chosen to "reflect the creative nature of the algorithm underneath".Multiple media outlets and financial analysts described Google as "rushing" Bard's announcement to preempt rival Microsoft's planned February 7 event unveiling its partnership with OpenAI to integrate ChatGPT into its Bing search engine in the form of Bing AI, as well as to avoid playing "catch-up" to Microsoft. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told The Verge: "I want people to know that we made them dance." Tom Warren of The Verge and Davey Alba of Bloomberg News noted that this marked the beginning of another clash between the two Big Tech companies over "the future of search", after their six-year "truce" expired in 2021; Chris Stokel-Walker of The Guardian, Sara Morrison of Recode, and analyst Dan Ives of investment firm Wedbush Securities labeled this an AI arms race between the two.
After an "underwhelming" February 8 livestream in Paris showcasing Bard, Google's stock fell eight percent, equivalent to a $100 billion loss in market value, and the YouTube video of the livestream was made private. Many viewers also pointed out an error during the demo in which Bard gives inaccurate information about the James Webb Space Telescope in response to a query. Google employees criticized Pichai's "rushed" and "botched" announcement of Bard on Memegen, the company's internal forum, while Maggie Harrison of Futurism called the rollout "chaos". Pichai defended his actions by saying that Google had been "deeply working on AI for a long time", rejecting the notion that Bard's launch was a knee-jerk reaction.
A week after the Paris livestream, Pichai had 80,000 employees dedicate two to four hours to dogfood testing Bard, while Google executive Prabhakar Raghavan had employees correct any errors Bard made. In the following weeks, Google employees criticized Bard in internal messages, citing safety and ethical concerns and calling on company leaders not to launch the service. Google executives launched the product, overruling a negative risk assessment report conducted by its AI ethics team. After Pichai suddenly laid off 12,000 employees later that month due to slowing revenue growth, remaining workers shared memes and snippets of their humorous exchanges with Bard soliciting its "opinion" on the layoffs. Google employees began testing a more sophisticated version of Bard with larger parameters, dubbed "Big Bard", in mid-March.
Launch
Google opened up early access for Bard on March 21, 2023, in a limited capacity, allowing users in the US and the UK to join a waitlist. Unlike Microsoft's approach with Bing Chat, Bard was launched as a standalone web application featuring a text box and a disclaimer that the chatbot "may display inaccurate or offensive information that doesn't represent Google's views". Three responses are then provided to each question, with users prompted to submit feedback on the usefulness of each answer. Google vice presidents Sissie Hsiao and Eli Collins framed Bard as a complement to Google Search and stated that the company had not determined how to make the service profitable. Among those granted early access were those enrolled in Google's "Pixel Superfans" loyalty program, users of its Pixel and Nest devices, and Google One subscribers.Bard is trained by third-party contractors hired by Google, including Appen and Accenture workers, whom Business Insider and Bloomberg News reported were placed under extreme pressure, overworked, and underpaid. Bard is also trained on data from publicly available sources, which Google disclosed by amending its privacy policy. Shortly after Bard's initial launch, Google reorganized the team behind Google Assistant, the company's virtual assistant, to focus on Bard instead.
Google researcher Jacob Devlin resigned from the company after claiming that Bard had surreptitiously leveraged data from ChatGPT; Google denied the allegations. Meanwhile, a senior software engineer at the company published an internal memo warning that Google was falling behind in the AI "arms race", not to OpenAI but to independent researchers in open-source communities. Pichai revealed on March 31 that the company intended to "upgrade" Bard by basing it on PaLM, a newer and more powerful LLM from Google, rather than LaMDA. The same day, Krawczyk announced that Google had added "math and logic capabilities" to Bard. Bard gained the ability to assist in coding in April, being compatible with more than 20 programming languages at launch. Microsoft also began running advertisements in the address bar of a developer build of the Edge browser, urging users to try Bing whenever they visit the Bard web app. 9to5Google reported that Google was working to integrate Bard into its ChromeOS operating system and Pixel devices.
Updates
Bard took center stage during the annual Google I/O keynote in May 2023, with Pichai and Hsiao announcing a series of updates to Bard, including the adoption of PaLM 2, integration with other Google products and third-party services, expansion to 180 countries, support for additional languages, and new features. In stark contrast to previous years, the Google Assistant was barely mentioned during the event. The expanded rollout did not include any nations in the European Union, possibly reflecting concerns about compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation. Those with Google Workspace accounts also gained access to the service. Google attempted to launch Bard in the EU in June but was blocked by the Irish Data Protection Commission, who requested a "data protection impact assessment" from the company; Bard was launched in the region and Brazil the next month, adding support for dozens of new languages and introducing personalization and productivity features. An invite-only chatroom on Discord was created in July, consisting of users who heavily used Bard. Over the next few months, the chatroom was flooded with comments questioning the usefulness of Bard.Google released a major update to the chatbot in September, integrating it into many of its products through "extensions", adding a button to attempt to fact-check AI-generated responses through Google Search, and allowing users to share conversation threads. Google also introduced the "Google-Extended" web crawler as part of its search engine's robots.txt indexing file to allow web publishers to opt-out of allowing Bard to scan them for training. Online users later discovered that Google Search was indexing Bard conversation threads on which users had enabled sharing; Google stated that this was an error which was corrected.
In October, during the company's annual Made by Google event, Hsiao unveiled "Assistant with Bard", an upgraded version of the Google Assistant which was integrated with Bard. When the U.S. Copyright Office solicited public comment on potential new regulation on generative AI technologies, Google joined with OpenAI and Microsoft in arguing that the responsibility for generating copyrighted material lay with the user, not the developer. Accenture contractors voted to join the Alphabet Workers Union in November, in protest of suboptimal working conditions, while the company filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California against a group of unidentified scammers who had been advertising malware disguised as a downloadable version of Bard.