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Gemini (also known as Google Gemini and formerly known as Bard) is a generative artificial intelligence–powered chatbot and virtual assistant developed by Google. It is powered by the large language model (LLM) of the same name, after previously being based on LaMDA and PaLM 2.
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 ("Nano") and cost-effective, high-throughput variants ("Flash") to high-compute models designed for complex reasoning ("Pro" and "Ultra"). 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.
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.
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 Microsoft Bing search engine in the form of Bing AI (later rebranded as Microsoft Copilot), 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 Scroogled 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 Dogfooding 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.
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 Microsoft 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.
In June, Google attempted to launch Bard in the EU but was blocked by the Irish Data Protection Commission, who requested a "data protection impact assessment" from the company. In July, Bard was launched in the EU and Brazil, adding support for dozens of new languages and introducing personalization and productivity features. An invite-only chatroom ("Discord server") 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.
On February 8, 2024, Bard and Duet AI were unified under the Gemini brand, with a mobile app launched on Android and the service integrated into the Google app on iOS. On Android, users who downloaded the app saw Gemini replace Assistant as their device's default virtual assistant, though Assistant remained a standalone service. Google also launched "Gemini Advanced with Ultra 1.0", available via a "Google One AI Premium" subscription, incorporated Gemini into its Google Messages app on Android, and announced a partnership with Stack Overflow.
Gemini again took center stage at the 2024 Google I/O keynote. Google announced that Gemini would be integrated into several products, including Android, Google Chrome, Google Photos, and Workspace. Gemini Advanced was upgraded to the "Gemini 1.5 Pro" language model, with Google previewing Gemini Live, a voice chat mode, and Gems, the ability to create custom chatbots.
In February 2025, Google introduced a feature for Gemini Advanced subscribers that can recall and reference past chats.
In June 2025, Google announced Gemini CLI, which is an open-source AI tool for terminals. At the same time, Google unveiled a new logo of Gemini that align its colors with color schemes used by the new gradient Google logo, with more rounded sparkles than the previous logo. The new logo is available for Android and iPhone devices.
The Washington Post columnist Geoffrey A. Fowler found Gemini a mixed bag, noting that it acted cautiously but could show Internet-influenced bias. Writing for ZDNET, Sabrina Ortiz believed ChatGPT and Bing Chat were "more capable overall" in comparison to Gemini, while Wired journalist Lauren Goode found her conversation with Gemini "the most bizarre" of the three. After the introduction of extensions, The New York Times Kevin Roose found the update underwhelming and "a bit of a mess", while Business Insider Lakshmi Varanasi found that Gemini often leaned more into flattery than facts.
In a 60 Minutes conversation with Hsiao, Google senior vice president James Manyika, and Pichai, CBS News correspondent Scott Pelley found Gemini "unsettling". Associate professor Ethan Mollick of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania was underwhelmed by its artistic ineptitude. The New York Times conducted a test with ChatGPT and Gemini regarding their ability to handle tasks expected of human assistants, and concluded that ChatGPT's performance was vastly superior to that of Gemini. NewsGuard, a tool that rates the credibility of news articles, found that Gemini was more skilled at debunking known conspiracy theories than ChatGPT. A report published by the Associated Press cautioned that Gemini and other chatbots were prone to generate "false and misleading information that threatened to disenfranchise voters".
In response, Krawczyk said that Google was "working to improve these kinds of depictions immediately", and Google paused Gemini's ability to generate images of people. Raghavan released a lengthy statement addressing the controversy, explaining that Gemini had "overcompensated" amid its efforts to strive for diversity and acknowledging that the images were "embarrassing and wrong". In an internal memo to employees, Pichai called the debacle offensive and unacceptable, promising structural and technical changes. Several employees in Google's trust and safety team were laid off days later. Hassabis stated that Gemini's ability to generate images of people would be restored within two weeks; it was ultimately relaunched in late August, powered by its new Imagen 3 model.
The market reacted negatively, with Google's stock falling by 4.4 percent. Pichai faced growing calls to resign, including from technology analysts Ben Thompson and Om Malik. House Republicans led by Jim Jordan subpoenaed Google, accusing the company of colluding with the Biden administration to censor speech. In light of the fiasco and Google's overall response to OpenAI, Business Insider Hugh Langley and Lara O'Reilly declared that Google was fast going "from vanguard to dinosaur". Bloomberg columnist Parmy Olson suggested that Google's "rushed" rollout of Gemini was the cause of its woes, not "wokeness".
Martin Peers, writing for The Information, opined that Google needed a leader like Mark Zuckerberg to defuse the situation. Hugging Face scientist Sasha Luccioni and Surrey University professor Alan Woodward believed that the incident had "deeply embedded" roots in Gemini's training corpus and algorithms, making it difficult to rectify. Jeremy Kahn of Fortune called for researchers focused on safety and responsibility to work together to develop better guardrails. New York magazine contributor John Herrman wrote: "It's a spectacular unforced error, a slapstick rake-in-the-face moment, and a testament to how panicked Google must be by the rise of OpenAI and the threat of AI to its search business."
Google aired two commercials during Super Bowl LIX in February 2025, both promoting Gemini. The first, entitled "50 States, 50 Stories", consisted of a national spot and 50 regional spots showcasing how small businesses in each U.S. state leverage Gemini in Google Workspace. Social media users noticed a factual error in Wisconsin's spot regarding gouda cheese, prompting Google to edit out the incorrect statistic, while The Verge claimed that Google had "faked" some of Gemini's output in the same commercial by plagiarizing text on the web.
Garett Sloane of Ad Age commented that these blunders illustrated the risks of advertising AI technology. The other commercial was entitled "Dream Job" and featured a father using Gemini on his Pixel 9 to prepare for a job interview; Google also ran a third commercial entitled "Party Blitz" online, in which a man "attempts to impress his girlfriend's family by using Gemini on to become a football expert".
In 2022, McLaren announced a multi-year partnership with Google. As part of Google's partnership extension with McLaren in 2024, Gemini was advertised on the McLaren Formula One car, including racing a special livery based on Gemini's color palette for the 2025 United States Grand Prix.
Indian Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology junior minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar alleged that Google had violated the country's Information Technology Rules by refusing to summarize an article by the right-wing news website OpIndia, and for saying that some experts described Prime Minister Narendra Modi's policies as fascist. In France, Google was fined by the competition regulator Autorité de la concurrence under the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market, in part due to its cited failure to inform local news publishers of when their content was used for Gemini's training. Voice of America accused Gemini of "parroting" Chinese propaganda.
In November 2024, CBS News reported that Gemini had responded to a college student in Michigan asking for help with homework in a threatening manner, calling the student "a burden on society" and saying "Please die. Please." A statement issued by Google said "This response violated our policies and we've taken action to prevent similar outputs from occurring."
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