Gemini is a family of multimodal large language models (LLMs) 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 Gemini chatbot, and was named after the Latin word for "twins" (symbolizing the merger of Google Brain and DeepMind) and NASA's Project Gemini.

History Development

Google announced Gemini, a large language model (LLM) 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 contains 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 (TPUs), 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 (MMLU) 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 In January 2024, Google partnered with Samsung to integrate Gemini Nano and Gemini Pro into its Galaxy S24 smartphone lineup. The following month, Bard and Duet AI were unified under the Gemini brand, with "Gemini Advanced with Ultra 1.0" releasing 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, describing it as a more powerful and capable model than 1.0 Ultra. Changes include a new architecture, a mixture-of-experts approach, and a larger one-million-token context window. The same month, Google debuted Gemma, a smaller, free and open-source range of Gemini models. Multiple publications described this as a response to Meta and others open-sourcing their AI models, and a reversal from Google's prior practice of keeping its AI proprietary. Google announced an additional model, Gemini 1.5 Flash, on May 14 at the 2024 I/O keynote. At the same event, Google announced plans to integrate a desktop-optimized build of Gemini Nano directly into the Google Chrome browser via its "Built-in AI" architecture, exposing local processing capabilities to web developers through experimental APIs such as the Prompt API ("window.ai").

In December 2024, Google announced the new Gemini 2.0 Flash Experimental model. Features include a Multimodal Live API for real-time audio and video interactions, native image and controllable text-to-speech generation (with watermarking), and integrated Google Search. It also introduces improved agentic capabilities, a new Google Gen AI SDK, and "Jules", an experimental AI coding agent for GitHub.

In March 2025, Google 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.

In February 2026, Gemini partnered with women's fashion brand L'Agence to utilize the tech company's virtual try-on technology for New York Fashion Week.

Model versions

The following table lists the main model versions of Gemini, describing the significant changes included with each version:

Version Release date Status Description 1.0 Nano Designed for on-device tasks and first available in Google's Pixel 8 Pro. 1.0 Pro Designed for a diverse range of tasks. 1.0 Ultra Google's most powerful offering in the Gemini 1.0 family. 1.5 Pro As a successor to the 1.0 series of models, 1.5 Pro offers significantly increased context size (up to 1 million tokens). It is designed to be the most capable model in the Gemini 1.5 family. 1.5 Flash This version got renamed from 'Nano' to 'Flash'. It is also Gemini's free model. 2.0 Flash Developed by Google with a focus on multimodality, agentic capabilities, and speed. 2.0 Flash-Lite First-ever Gemini Flash-Lite model designed for cost-efficiency and speed.2.0 Pro 2.5 Pro 2.5 Flash 2.5 Flash-Lite 2.5 Flash Image (Nano Banana) (Publicly) 3 ProGemini 3 Pro is not a modification or a fine-tune or a prior model. It is the foundational model of the Gemini 3 series. A sparse mixture-of-experts, natively multimodal, reasoning model. It can process text, visual, and audio inputs. It supports up to 1,000,000 input tokens and 64,000 output tokens.3 Pro Image (Nano Banana Pro) An improved version of Nano Banana, which includes better text rendering and better real world knowledge. It was released as a preview model on , and made generally available on .3 Deep ThinkBased on the 2.5 Pro "Deep Think" mode that achieved high ratings in IOI 3 Flash Based on Gemini 3 Pro. 3.1 Pro Based on Gemini 3 Pro. Created to handle complex reasoning tasks across large datasets and diverse inputs, including text, audio, image, video, and entire codebases. 3.1 Flash Image (Nano Banana 2) Based on Gemini 3 Flash. Designed to generate both image and text outputs.3.1 Flash-Lite Based on Gemini 3 Pro. It is optimized for high-volume, latency-sensitive tasks such as translation, and text classification.3.5 Flash Based on Gemini 3 Flash.3.1 Flash-Lite Image (Nano Banana 2 Lite) Based on Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite. It is optimized for cost-effective image generation.3.5 Flash-Lite Based on Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite. It is optimized for high-volume, latency-sensitive tasks such as translation, text classification, and supporting agentic workflows.3.6 Flash Based on Gemini 3.5 Flash. Offers improvements in coding, general knowledge, and multimodal processing, alongside increased token efficiency relative to its predecessor.3.7 Flash Based on Gemini 3.6 Flash. It features improvements to its core reasoning foundation.3.8 Flash Based on Gemini 3.7 Flash. A version with a more permissive set of mitigations for cybersecurity, 3.8 Flash Cyber, is available through Google's Fairwind Program.4 Argon Increases the output token limit from 64,000 to 1,000,000 tokens, improves coding and business task execution, and strengthens use guardrails.Nano Banana 2.1 Based on Gemini 3.6 Flash.

Nano Banana

Nano Banana (officially Gemini 2.5 Flash Image), Nano Banana Pro (officially Gemini 3 Pro Image) and Nano Banana 2 (officially Gemini 3.1 Flash Image) are image generation and editing models.

"Nano Banana" was the codename used for the model while it was undergoing anonymous public testing on LMArena, first appearing on August 12, 2025. It was released on the Gemini app and related Google AI services on August 26, 2025. The codename "Nano Banana" originated from nicknames given to Naina Raisinghani, Product Manager at Google DeepMind. Google later confirmed its identity as Gemini 2.5 Flash Image in an official announcement upon public release. On November 20, 2025, DeepMind released Nano Banana Pro (Gemini 3 Pro Image) with improved text rendering and world knowledge.

On release, Nano Banana became a viral Internet sensation on social media, particularly for its photorealistic "3D figurine" images. Following its release, Nano Banana was made available in the Gemini app, Google AI Studio, and through Vertex AI. According to Google, it helped attract over 10 million new users to the Gemini app and facilitated more than 200 million image edits within weeks of launch.