Google's year in review: 8 areas with research breakthroughs in 2025

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)

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.

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 capabilities. We reimagined software development by moving beyond tools that assist coding to introducing powerful, agentic systems that collaborate with developers. Key advances, such as the impressive coding capabilities in Gemini 3 and the launch of Google Antigravity, mark a new era in AI-assisted software development.

This evolution was also clear across our core products, from AI-enabled features on the Pixel 10 and updates to AI Mode in Search like generative UI, to AI-first innovations like the Gemini app and NotebookLM, which gained advanced features like Deep Research.

• 9 ways AI makes Pixel 10 our most helpful phone yet (Aug 2025)
• Expanding AI Overviews and introducing AI Mode (March 2025)
• Gemini 3 brings upgraded smarts and new capabilities to the Gemini app (Nov 2025)
• NotebookLM adds Deep Research and support for more source types (Nov 2025)
• Generative UI: A rich, custom, visual interactive user experience for any prompt (Nov 2025)

Empowering creativity and co-creating with AI

2025 was a transformative year for generative media, giving people new and unprecedented capabilities to realize their creative ambitions. Generative media models and tools for video, images, audio and worlds became more effective and broadly used, with breakouts Nano Banana and Nano Banana Pro offering unprecedented capabilities for native image generation and editing. We worked with people in creative industries to develop tools like Flow and Music AI Sandbox, making them more helpful for creative workflows, and we expanded creative possibilities for people with new, AI-powered experiences in the Google Arts & Culture lab, major upgrades to image editing within the Gemini app, and the introduction of powerful new generative media models like Veo 3.1, Imagen 4 and Flow.

As research breakthroughs continue to expand AI’s capabilities, Google Labs is where we share AI experiments as we develop them. Some of this year’s most engaging experiments from Labs: Pomelli, Stitch, Jules, and Google Beam.

Advancing science and mathematics

2025 was also a banner year for scientific advances with AI, marked by breakthroughs in life sciences, health, natural sciences, and mathematics.

In the space of a year, we made progress in building AI resources and tools that empower researchers and help them understand, identify, and develop treatments in healthcare. We also marked the 5-year anniversary of AlphaFold, the Nobel-winning AI system that solved the 50-year-old protein folding problem. AlphaFold has been used by over 3 million researchers in more than 190 countries.

• AlphaFold: Five years of impact (Nov 2025)
• Using AI to identify genetic variants in tumors with DeepSomatic (Oct 2025)
• AlphaGenome: AI for better understanding the genome (June 2025)

Gemini’s advanced thinking capabilities, including Deep Think, also enabled historic progress in mathematics and coding. Deep Think was able to solve problems that require deep abstract reasoning – achieving gold medal-standard in two international contests.

Shaping innovations in computing and the physical world

We’re also leading major discoveries and shaping the future of science in areas like quantum computing and the physical world, ensuring we have the hardware foundations for the next era of intelligence.