Google 2025 recap: Research breakthroughs of the year

Google's year in review: 8 areas with research breakthroughs in 2025 2025 has been a year of extraordinary progress in research. With artificial intelligence, we can see its trajectory shifting from a tool to a utility: from something people use to something they can put to work. If 2024 was about laying the multimodal foundations for this era, 2025 was the year AI began to really think, act and explore the world alongside us. With quantum computing, we made progress towards real-world applications. And across the board, we helped turn research into reality, with more capable and useful products and tools making a positive impact on people's lives today. Here’s a look back at some of the breakthroughs, products and scientific milestones that defined the work of Google, Google DeepMind and Google Research in a year of relentless progress . Delivering breakthroughs on world-class models This year, we significantly advanced our model capabilities with breakthroughs on reasoning, multimodal understanding, model efficiency, and generative capabilities, beginning with the release of Gemini 2.5 in March and culminating in the November launch of Gemini 3 and the December launch of Gemini 3 Flash. Built on a foundation of state-of-the-art reasoning, Gemini 3 Pro is our most powerful model to date, designed to help you bring any idea to life. It topped the LMArena Leaderboard and redefined multimodal reasoning with breakthrough scores on benchmarks like Humanity’s Last Exam - a fiendishly hard test for AI models to see if AI can truly think and reason like humans - and GPQA Diamond. It also set a new standard for frontier models in mathematics, achieving a new state-of-the-art of 23.4% on MathArena Apex. We followed shortly with Gemini 3 Flash, which combines Gemini 3's Pro-grade reasoning with Flash-level latency, efficiency and cost, making it the most performant model for its size. Gemini 3 Flash's quality surpasses our previous Gemini 2.5 Pro-scale model's capabilities at a fraction of the price and substantially better latency, continuing our Gemini-era trend of 'the next generation's Flash model is better than the previous generation's Pro model'. Learn more about our progress on our world-class AI models this year: Gemini 3 Flash: frontier intelligence built for speed (Dec 2025) A new era of intelligence with Gemini 3 (Nov 2025) Introducing Nano Banana Pro (Nov 2025) Introducing Veo 3.1 and new creative capabilities in the Gemini API (Nov 2025) Gemini 2.5: Our most intelligent AI model (March 2025) Gemini 3 Flash price & benchmark table. We’re committed to making useful AI technology accessible, with state-of-the-art open models. We built our Gemma family of models to be lightweight and open for public use; this year we were able to introduce multimodal capabilities, significantly increase the context window, expand multilingual capabilities, and improve efficiency and performance. Learn more about this year’s advances in Gemma models: Innovating and transforming our products with AI Throughout 2025, we continued to advance the trajectory of AI from tool to utility, transforming our portfolio of products with new, powerful agentic...

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