Gemini Versions

The Bard launch (March 2023) and the Bard–to–Gemini rename (February 2024)

Google's reactive answer to ChatGPT was announced on February 6, 2023 and shipped to early-access US and UK users on March 21, 2023 as Bard, an experimental conversational AI service backed by LaMDA. The launch demo's well-publicized error — the model misattributed the first exoplanet image to the James Webb Space Telescope — helped frame the early-2023 narrative that Google was caught flat-footed by OpenAI's November 2022 ChatGPT release. EU access was blocked initially over GDPR concerns and came online in July 2023.

At Google I/O on May 10, 2023, Bard's underlying model swapped from LaMDA to PaLM 2. Specialty variants — Med-PaLM 2 for medical question answering, Sec-PaLM for security — followed. Duet AI for Workspace shipped at $30/user/month on August 29, 2023 as the productivity-suite analog. The PaLM API was deprecated entirely once Gemini 1.0 shipped in December 2023.

The Bard–to–Gemini rename happened on February 8, 2024, the same day Gemini 1.0 Ultra reached general availability via the new Gemini Advanced subscription on the $19.99/month Google One AI Premium plan. bard.google.com began redirecting to gemini.google.com; Duet AI for Workspace was rebranded Gemini for Workspace; a new Android Gemini app shipped that day. The post is at blog.google. Gemini Advanced was itself rebranded Google AI Pro at I/O 2025 on May 20, 2025 alongside the higher-priced Google AI Ultra tier ($249.99/month).

The rebrand pattern continued on July 16, 2026, when Google renamed NotebookLM to Gemini Notebook — folding the research tool that launched as Project Tailwind at I/O 2023 into the Gemini brand. Google's post says it “remains a standalone product focused on being your premier research tool” while doing more across the Google ecosystem, and cites more than 30 million people and over 600,000 organizations using it. Shipping alongside the rename: a secure cloud computer per notebook that lets Gemini Notebook write and execute code natively against your sources (available at launch to Google AI Ultra users and Workspace customers with AI Ultra / AI Expanded Access, rolling out to all Pro users on the web), full cross-app syncing between the Gemini app and the standalone notebook experience, and a stated plan to bring notebooks into AI Mode in Search. The announcement, by Google Labs / Gemini app VP Josh Woodward, is at blog.google.

The Brain × DeepMind merger (April 2023)

On April 20, 2023, Sundar Pichai announced the merger of Google Brain and DeepMind into a single unit, Google DeepMind, with Demis Hassabis (DeepMind cofounder, then CEO) named CEO of the combined entity. The announcement is at blog.google/technology/ai/april-ai-update; DeepMind's side is at deepmind.google/blog/announcing-google-deepmind.

Jeff Dean, previously the Google Brain lead, was named Chief Scientist of Google + Alphabet, reporting directly to Pichai. The combined unit's accomplishments cited in the announcement: AlphaGo, the original Transformer paper, word2vec, WaveNet, AlphaFold, seq2seq, deep reinforcement learning, TensorFlow, and JAX. The merger is the corporate-side throughline that explains why Gemini was framed in December 2023 as “natively multimodal trained from the ground up” — Google's first model assembled by the unified post-merger team.

Demis Hassabis and DeepMind's John Jumper were jointly awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with David Baker for AlphaFold's protein-structure-prediction work. The DeepMind announcement is at deepmind.google. Hassabis remains CEO of Google DeepMind through April 2026.

The February 2024 Gemini image-generation incident

Within days of the Bard–to–Gemini rename, users posted historically inaccurate images Gemini's image generator produced — racially diverse Nazi soldiers, multi-ethnic US Founding Fathers, Black female popes — that drew sharp criticism. Google paused people-image generation in Gemini on February 22, 2024. The explainer post by then-SVP for Search Prabhakar Raghavan said directly: “we got it wrong.”

On February 28, 2024 Pichai's internal memo — reported in NPR — called the outputs “completely unacceptable” and committed to structural changes, updated guidelines, and red-teaming. People-image generation was restored on August 28, 2024 with Imagen 3, gradually rolled out starting with Gemini Advanced / Business / Enterprise; TechCrunch coverage.

The episode is recorded here factually because it bears on the Gemini-1.0 / Imagen-2 rollout window and on Google's subsequent moderation framing for image generation. This page does not litigate the underlying decisions or their handling.

The DOJ search-monopoly case — US v. Google, D.D.C.

The case, US v. Google, D.D.C. case number 1:20-cv-03010 before Judge Amit P. Mehta, was filed October 20, 2020 and went to a non-jury trial in 2023–2024. The CourtListener docket is the canonical entry point.

The August 5, 2024 liability ruling held that Google “is a monopolist, and it has acted as one,” with Sherman Act §2 violations in the general-search-services and general-search-text-advertising markets. The September 2, 2025 remedies opinion rejected a Chrome divestiture but barred Google from exclusive distribution contracts for Search, Chrome, Google Assistant, and the Gemini app; ordered the search index and user-interaction data to be shared with rivals; and installed a six-year technical-oversight committee. The opinion explicitly states the judgment “covers Google's GenAI tool (Gemini), any successors, and any other Google products that fit the GenAI definition,” on the theory that Google cannot use its search monopoly to box out GenAI competitors. The DOJ press release is at justice.gov.

Final remedies were entered December 5, 2025; the case was formally terminated at the district level December 9, 2025 and is now in appellate proceedings on three tracks. Google filed its notice of appeal January 16, 2026, challenging the data-sharing requirements and the technical-committee oversight; DOJ and a majority of state AGs filed a cross-appeal by February 3, 2026, seeking the Chrome / Android divestitures and Apple-default-deal break-up that Judge Mehta declined to order. In a May 2026 order, Judge Mehta required DOJ to give 45 days' advance notice before any Qualified Competitor may access the data-sharing or syndication remedies — allowing Google to seek a stay at that juncture — but did not grant the blanket stay Google had sought. Google filed its 111-page opening appellate merits brief at the D.C. Circuit on May 22, 2026, contesting both the August 2024 liability ruling and the September 2025 remedies order and arguing the district court conflated harm to competitors with harm to the competitive process; the filing also objected that the data-sharing remedies open Google's index and user data to GenAI rivals such as OpenAI that “did not even exist” during the conduct at issue, per Courthouse News. D.C. Circuit argument is projected for late 2026 or early 2027. The ad-tech case, US v. Google in the Eastern District of Virginia (case 1:23-cv-00108, Judge Brinkema), held Google liable on April 17, 2025 for monopolizing the publisher ad-server and open-web display ad-exchange markets; remedies-phase closing arguments were November 2025 with the opinion still in progress as of late July 2026 — the docket's last known filing remains April 8, 2026 (observers projected a final order sometime in 2026, followed by an immediate appeal). Both cases bear on Gemini distribution — verify the docket status at write time.

The Anthropic investments

Google has been one of Anthropic's two major cloud and capital partners alongside Amazon, which remains Anthropic's primary cloud provider. The October 27, 2023 $2 billion commitment ($500M upfront, $1.5B over time) was reported in CNBC, alongside Anthropic's $3B Google Cloud commitment over four years and adoption of TPU v5e for Claude inference.

On April 24, 2026, Google announced an additional commitment of up to $40 billion in Anthropic — $10B initial, with the remaining $30B contingent on performance milestones — at Anthropic's then-latest valuation of $380 billion. Coverage in TechCrunch, CNBC, and Bloomberg, which first reported the deal.

On the compute side, Anthropic announced on April 6, 2026 a new agreement with Google and chip partner Broadcom for multiple gigawatts of next-generation TPU capacity expected to come online starting in 2027 — 5 gigawatts over five years per CNBC — which Anthropic called “our most significant compute commitment to date” in its own announcement. That post also notes that Amazon remains Anthropic's primary cloud provider and training partner; Google is a capital partner and one of three platforms Claude runs on. A widely-circulated figure putting Anthropic's Google Cloud spend at $200 billion over five years originates with The Information (May 5, 2026) and was relayed by Reuters, which noted it could not verify the report and that neither company commented; neither Google nor Anthropic has confirmed it, so it is recorded here as reported, not confirmed. The scale of the bet surfaced in Alphabet's Q2 2026 results, reported July 22, 2026: roughly $99 billion in quarterly gains on equity investments — primarily the Anthropic and SpaceX stakes, after Anthropic's May 2026 raise at a $965 billion valuation — drove a record $112.1 billion net-income quarter, per Fortune; Bloomberg reported July 23 that Alphabet's SEC filing valued its private-company investments — primarily the Anthropic stake — at roughly $124.3 billion as of June 30, 2026. The Anthropic relationship is the corporate-strategy counterweight to the in-house Gemini line; for the Anthropic side, see Anthropic Leadership.

Project Astra, Gemini Live, and Project Mariner

Project Astra — the “universal AI agent” prototype with the smart-glasses demo — was first unveiled at Google I/O on May 14, 2024 as a research preview. The DeepMind page is at deepmind.google/models/project-astra. Astra's multimodal real-time understanding capabilities folded into Gemini Live (consumer) and into Search's AI Mode (May 2025).

Gemini Live, the conversational voice surface (10 voices, interruptible, runs in background), launched alongside the Pixel 9 series on August 13, 2024, initially as a Gemini Advanced subscriber feature. Camera and screen-sharing capabilities followed in 2025 as Astra's surface migrated into the Gemini app.

Project Mariner — the Gemini 2.0–powered research-prototype Chrome extension that controls the browser (cursor, clicks, forms) — was announced December 11, 2024 alongside the Gemini 2.0 Flash Experimental release. Single-tab and foreground-only at launch; 83.5% on the WebVoyager benchmark. Mariner's computer-use capability was folded into Gemini 2.5 Flash by I/O 2025 and into the Antigravity agent platform that launched alongside Gemini 3 Pro.

At Google I/O 2026 on May 19, 2026, Google launched Gemini Spark — a 24/7 personal AI agent that runs on Gemini 3.5 Flash via the Antigravity platform. Spark operates in the background and is designed to take actions on the user's behalf (scheduling, web tasks, custom sub-agents, authorized payments) while surfacing confirmations before major actions. The initial rollout is to trusted testers / AI Ultra subscribers in the US; the announcement is at blog.google. Gemini Spark is the consumer-facing instantiation of the agentic direction that Astra and Mariner prototyped in 2024–2025.

Imagen and Veo

The image and video lines under the Gemini umbrella ship on a parallel cadence to the chat models. Imagen 1 (May 2022) was a Google Brain research model; Imagen 2 (December 2023) powered Bard's image generation and was the model behind the February 2024 incident; Imagen 3 (announced May 14, 2024 at I/O; ImageFX rollout August 15, 2024; people-image return August 28, 2024) introduced the photorealistic-rendering jump. Imagen 4 shipped at I/O 2025 (May 20, 2025) in Standard, Fast, and Ultra variants with major text-rendering improvements and up to 2K resolution; Workspace Docs / Slides / Vids integration followed. The Imagen 4 line is now deprecated — imagen-4.0-generate-001, -fast-generate-001, and -ultra-generate-001 are scheduled to shut down August 17, 2026 per the June 15, 2026 Gemini API changelog entry, with the Nano Banana lineage (gemini-3-pro-image / gemini-2.5-flash-image) as the recommended replacement for image generation.

Nano Banana Pro (November 20, 2025; preview id gemini-3-pro-image-preview, stable GA id gemini-3-pro-image released May 28, 2026) followed Gemini 2.5 Flash Image as a professional design engine with a reasoning core — studio-quality 4K visuals, complex layouts, and precise text rendering, framed as the high-end successor to the original Nano Banana model. Nano Banana 2 (February 26, 2026; preview id gemini-3.1-flash-image-preview, stable GA id gemini-3.1-flash-image released May 28, 2026) shipped as the speed-and-volume sibling on the 3.1 base — high-efficiency production-scale visual creation, optimized for the rapid-iteration use cases the original Nano Banana shape was named for. Both preview ids are deprecated and shut down June 25, 2026 per the Gemini API deprecations page; the stable ids are documented at ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/image-generation. Nano Banana 2 Lite (gemini-3.1-flash-lite-image, stable GA released June 30, 2026) followed as the efficiency specialist of the family — ultra-low latency (text-to-image in ~4 seconds), $0.034 per 1K-resolution image, and 1K output only — and is now Google’s recommended replacement for the original Nano Banana (gemini-2.5-flash-image) on high-volume, cost-sensitive pipelines; the announcement is at blog.google. The Nano Banana shape now spans four models — the 2.5 Flash Image table row above plus Nano Banana Pro, Nano Banana 2, and Nano Banana 2 Lite in this prose section — covering the original codename, the professional tier, the balanced workhorse, and the speed/cost tier.

Veo 1 debuted as a Vertex research preview at I/O 2024. Veo 2 (December 16, 2024) brought 4K resolution and clips up to two minutes. Veo 3 at I/O 2025 was the first Veo with native synchronized audio — dialogue, sound effects, and ambient sound generated in the same pass — available initially through the AI Ultra tier and via the Google Flow filmmaking surface. Veo 3.1 Lite Preview (veo-3.1-lite-generate-preview, March 31, 2026) is the cost-efficient, developer-first addition to the Veo 3.1 family for rapid iteration and high-volume applications, per the Gemini API changelog. The earlier veo-2.0-generate-001, veo-3.0-generate-001, and veo-3.0-fast-generate-001 ids are deprecated and scheduled to shut down June 30, 2026 (June 15, 2026 changelog entry); the Veo 3.1 preview ids and the GA models on the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform are the recommended replacements.

At Google I/O 2026 on May 19, 2026, Google introduced Gemini Omni Flash, a multimodal “any-input, any-output” video generation and editing model that accepts text, image, video, and audio inputs and generates high-quality video output. The I/O announcement is at blog.google. Omni Flash is designed for creative workflows — scene transformation, action reimagining, multi-turn conversational video refinement, and avatar-based video creation — and is built on Gemini’s world knowledge for physically plausible scene generation. On June 30, 2026, Google brought Omni Flash to developers for the first time as gemini-omni-flash-preview (public preview) via the Gemini API, Google AI Studio, and the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, alongside the Gemini app and Google Flow; it is priced at $0.10 per second of video output (matching Veo 3.1 Fast) and generates 10-second clips at launch, with SynthID watermarking on all output. The joint developer-availability post is at blog.google; the developer docs are at ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/omni. Image and video models are deliberately not enumerated as separate rows in the version table above (Gemini 2.5 Flash Image is the one row exception); if either line grows substantially, a dedicated /ai/gemini/image-models/ sibling page is in scope.

People who shaped Gemini

Sundar Pichai — CEO of Google since 2015, CEO of Alphabet since December 2019. The 2023 ChatGPT-response framing, the Brain × DeepMind merger, the December 2023 Gemini 1.0 launch, the February 2024 image-generation memo, and the strategy around the DOJ search remedies all run through Pichai's office.

Demis Hassabis — CEO of Google DeepMind since the April 2023 merger. DeepMind cofounder. 2024 Nobel laureate in Chemistry (jointly with then-DeepMind colleague John Jumper and David Baker) for AlphaFold. The technical-leadership face of the post-merger Gemini program.

Two senior departures landed in June 2026. Noam Shazeer — VP of engineering and a co-lead of the Gemini models, co-author of the 2017 “Attention Is All You Need” paper that introduced the Transformer, and cofounder of Character.AI — announced on June 17, 2026 that he was leaving for OpenAI, less than two years after Google brought him back in the reported $2.7B Character.AI licensing deal of August 2024; CNBC covered the move. Days later, John Jumper — the AlphaFold lead who shared the 2024 Nobel with Hassabis — announced he was leaving Google DeepMind for Anthropic, per Fortune (June 23, 2026). Neither has publicly stated a reason. Recorded here because both sat at the technical center of the Gemini and AlphaFold programs; this page does not handicap what the departures mean for the lab.

Jeff Dean — Chief Scientist, Google + Alphabet (since the April 2023 merger), reporting directly to Pichai. Previously co-led Google Brain. Sissie Hsiao led the Bard product through the rename. Eli Collins (VP, Google DeepMind product) co-launched Bard alongside Hsiao. Prabhakar Raghavan (then SVP, Search) authored the February 2024 image-generation explainer; he transitioned out of Search leadership in October 2024.

Current leadership beyond Pichai / Hassabis / Dean shifts more frequently and should be re-verified at each refresh run; the Musk v. Altman–style governance episode that has played out at OpenAI does not have a Google analog.

The competitive landscape

Gemini competes most directly with OpenAI's ChatGPT (the line that Bard was Google's reactive response to in 2023; see ChatGPT Versions), Anthropic's Claude (Google's primary capital and cloud partner alongside Amazon; see Claude Versions), xAI's Grok (see Grok Versions), and Meta's Llama. Gemini's distinguishing positioning has been the integration into Search, Workspace, Pixel devices, and Chrome alongside the standalone Gemini app, and the on-device Nano line that no other major frontier lab has matched at scale. This page does not attempt a benchmark roundup or a ranking.