Google's AI research spans two decades of foundational contributions. Google Brain (founded 2011 by Jeff Dean, Andrew Ng, Greg Corrado) and DeepMind (founded 2010 in London by Demis Hassabis, acquired 2014 for ~$650M) merged in April 2023 into Google DeepMind. Alphabet (parent since 2015) has a market cap of ~$3.56T.
Google researchers authored many of the most important papers in modern AI: Attention Is All You Need (2017, the Transformer), BERT (2018), Vision Transformer (2020), Chain-of-Thought (2022), and Chinchilla (2022). The Gemini model family advanced from 1.0 (2023) through Gemini 3.1 Pro to the Gemini 3.8 Flash workhorse tier (September 2026, AA Intelligence Index v4.3: 41). The open-weight Gemma series (2024–) provides Apache 2.0 models up to 27B.
DeepMind's scientific breakthroughs include AlphaGo (defeated world Go champion, 2016), AlphaFold 2 (solved protein structure prediction, predicted 200M+ structures, won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for Hassabis and John Jumper), and GraphCast (ML weather forecasting outperforming ECMWF). Noam Shazeer, Transformer co-author, returned from Character.AI in August 2024 to co-lead Gemini development.
Your notes
People
- Demis Hassabis Google ScholarOpenReview — CEO, Google DeepMind; 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry (formerly DeepMind (Co-founder); PhD UCL)
- Jeff Dean Google ScholarOpenReview — Chief Scientist, Google DeepMind & Google Research (formerly Google (joined 1999, employee)
- Noam Shazeer Google ScholarOpenReview — VP Engineering, Gemini Co-lead (returned Aug 2024) (formerly Character.AI (Co-founder & CEO); Google (2000-2021))
- Oriol Vinyals Google ScholarOpenReview — VP of Research, Gemini Co-lead (formerly Google Brain; PhD UC Berkeley)
- Koray Kavukcuoglu Google ScholarOpenReview — CTO & Chief AI Architect (SVP) (formerly NEC Labs; PhD NYU (Yann LeCun))
News
- 2026-09-16 Google Launches the DeepMind Institute, a Founder-Led AGI Policy Vehicle Directed by Legg, Manyika, and Hassabis — DeepMind Institute
- 2026-09-15 Gemini 3.8 Live and Gemini 3.8 Live Extended Thinking: Native Audio Models in 97 Languages; Extended Thinking Takes #1 on the AA Speech-to-Speech Index (82.6) — Google
- 2026-09-08 DeepMind Releases AlphaGenome Atlas: Precomputed Effects for All 9 Billion Human SNVs, a 1 PB Dataset (>30× AlphaFold DB) With a New AVI Variant-Impact Score, Free for Academic Use — Google DeepMind
- 2026-09-03 WeatherNext 3 Launched: Hourly 5 km Forecasts Initialized on Live Satellite Mosaics, Precipitation CRPS Up 60% vs IMERG; Now Powering Search, Gemini, and Maps — Google
- 2026-09-03 Google and Janelia Publish the Complete Male Drosophila Central Nervous System Connectome (166K Neurons, 125M Synapses) — Google Research
- 2026-09-02 Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber Released: Same $0.75/$3.75 Pricing, AAII 59 at Launch (v4.1.1), Fairwind Program Gates the Cyber Model — Google
- 2026-08-27 Antigravity 'Teamwork' Preview: Many-Agent Research Harness Produces a Lean-Verified Proof of Knuth's Cycles Conjecture — Google Antigravity
- 2026-08-06 DeepMind Leadership Reshuffle: Hassabis Becomes DeepMind Chair and Alphabet Chief Scientist, Koray Kavukcuoglu Runs Day-to-Day as SVP, Jeff Dean Leaves Google to Found a Startup — TIME
- 2026-06-24 Computer Use Becomes a Native Tool in Gemini 3.5 Flash, Spanning Browser, Mobile, and Desktop — Google
- 2026-06-18 DeepMind Talent Exodus: Gemini Co-Lead Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI; Nobel Laureate John Jumper Joins Anthropic Days Later — Fortune
- 2026-05-26 DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis: Humanity Has 'a Few Years' to Prepare for AGI; 'Foothills of the Singularity' — Axios
- 2026-05-19 I/O 2026: Gemini 3.5 Flash (AAII 55), Gemini Omni Video Generator, Antigravity 2.0, Gemini Spark, AI Ultra Repriced $200/mo — Google
- 2026-04-22 Cloud Next '26: TPU 8t/8i Announced, Deep Research Max Agents, Chrome Auto Browse, Thinking Machines Lab Multi-Billion Deal — 9to5Google
- 2026-04-14 Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6 Launched; Boston Dynamics Partnership for Industrial AI — Boston Dynamics
- 2026-04-02 Gemma 4 Open Models Released — Google Developers Blog
- 2026-02-19 Gemini 3.1 Pro Released, Ties #1 on AA Intelligence Index — Google DeepMind
- 2026-01-12 Alphabet Hits $4T Market Cap — CNBC
- 2024-10-09 Demis Hassabis & John Jumper Awarded Nobel Prize in Chemistry — Google DeepMind