Background co-founders
Sergey Brin () and
Larry Page () were summoned out of retirement to discuss Google's response to
OpenAI's
ChatGPT. In November 2022,
OpenAI launched
ChatGPT, a chatbot based on the
GPT-3 family of
large language models (LLMs).
Gemini Rebranding On December 6, 2023, Google announced
Gemini, a larger,
multimodal LLM. Gemini 1.5 Flash, a faster and more cost-efficient variant aimed at developers, was announced at Google I/O in May 2024 alongside the expansion of Gemini Advanced. On December 11, 2024, Google announced Gemini 2.0 Flash as the first model in the Gemini 2.0 generation, framing it as the beginning of an "agentic era" in which AI models could take autonomous multi-step actions. Unlike previous Gemini models, 2.0 Flash supported native multimodal outputs, including generated images and text-to-speech audio, in addition to multimodal inputs. It also introduced Deep Research for Gemini Advanced users, enabling the model to autonomously browse and synthesize information across sources. Gemini 2.0 Flash became generally available on February 5, 2025, alongside an experimental release of Gemini 2.0 Pro and the budget-oriented Gemini 2.0 Flash-Lite. Gemini 2.5 Pro Experimental was released on March 25, 2025, as Google's first explicitly designated "thinking model", capable of reasoning through steps before responding using chain-of-thought techniques. It debuted at the top of the LMArena leaderboard, a benchmark measuring human preference for AI responses, where it remained for several months. Gemini 2.5 Flash was unveiled at Google I/O in May 2025 and reached general availability in June 2025 alongside the cost-optimized Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite. On November 18, 2025, Google launched Gemini 3 Pro, describing it as its most intelligent model to date and marking a departure from the company's previous staged release patterns, with the model made immediately available across the Gemini app, Google Search, Google AI Studio, and Vertex AI on launch day. A more capable "Deep Think" reasoning mode began rolling out to Google AI Ultra subscribers in the weeks that followed. Gemini 3 Flash, a speed-optimized variant, followed in December 2025, becoming the new default model in the Gemini app. In February 2026, Google released a major upgrade to Gemini 3 Deep Think, which it described as targeting practical applications in science, research, and engineering. On February 19, 2026, Google launched Gemini 3.1 Pro in preview, characterizing it as a step forward in core reasoning. The model achieved an ARC-AGI-2 score of 77.1 percent, more than double that of Gemini 3 Pro, and 80.6 percent on SWE-Bench Verified, a benchmark for autonomous software engineering tasks.
Consumer features and updates Originally introduced by Google in August 2024, Gemini Live debuted on the
Pixel 9 series as the default virtual assistant, replacing the Google Assistant on those devices. It was later rolled out to Samsung Galaxy devices beginning with the
Galaxy S25 series in July 2025, and subsequently expanded to models including the
Z Fold 7 and
Z Flip 7, where it became part of the
Galaxy AI suite. In February 2025, Google introduced a feature for Gemini Advanced subscribers that enables the assistant to recall and reference past conversations. In June 2025, Google announced Gemini CLI, an open-source AI agent for use in computer terminals. At the same time, Google introduced a new Gemini logo with more rounded sparkles and a color scheme aligned with the updated
Google logo. ==Reception==