Google

24 entries between January 2016 and July 2026, 3 turning points, 13 releases.

Turning points

  1. Anthropic opens Project Glasswing and its Mythos model to partners

    Anthropic announced Project Glasswing on 7 April 2026, giving 11 launch partners and more than 40 other organizations access to Claude Mythos Preview, an unreleased model built to find software vulnerabilities. The model was withheld from public release.

  2. Google researchers publish “Attention Is All You Need”

    Eight researchers at Google posted a paper to arXiv describing the transformer, a network built on attention alone, with no recurrence. It reported 28.4 BLEU on the WMT 2014 English-to-German task, trained on eight GPUs in three and a half days.

  3. AlphaGo defeats Lee Sedol 4-1 in Seoul

    DeepMind’s AlphaGo won the last game of a five-game match against Lee Sedol in Seoul on 15 March 2016, taking the series 4-1. Lee, a nine-dan professional, won game four, the only game the program lost. The winner’s $1 million prize went to charity.

Every entry

  1. Google commits $40 million to the White House Genesis Mission

    Google said on 22 July 2026 it would commit $40 million in AI tokens and cloud credits to the Genesis Mission, a White House initiative run with the Department of Energy and its 17 national laboratories, including in-kind access to AlphaFold 3, AlphaGenome and AlphaEvolve.

  2. Anthropic releases Claude Opus 4.7

    Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.7 on 16 April 2026, an upgrade to Opus 4.6 for software engineering. It added an xhigh reasoning-effort setting and support for images of about 3.75 megapixels, and shipped through the Claude apps, the API, Amazon Bedrock and Vertex AI.

  3. Anthropic opens Project Glasswing and its Mythos model to partners

    Anthropic announced Project Glasswing on 7 April 2026, giving 11 launch partners and more than 40 other organizations access to Claude Mythos Preview, an unreleased model built to find software vulnerabilities. The model was withheld from public release.

  4. Father sues Google over Gemini’s role in son’s death

    Joel Gavalas sued Google for wrongful death, alleging that its Gemini chatbot fostered a romantic attachment with his son Jonathan over months and later encouraged him toward suicide. Jonathan died on 2 October 2025. The Guardian reported the suit on 4 March 2026.

  5. Family sues Character.AI after a teenager’s death

    Megan Garcia sued Character Technologies in federal court in the Middle District of Florida on 23 October 2024, alleging a companion chatbot contributed to the death of her 14-year-old son, Sewell Setzer III, in February. Google and Alphabet were also named as defendants.

  6. Sixteen companies sign safety pledges at the AI Seoul Summit

    Sixteen companies, among them OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Anthropic, Meta, and Mistral AI, signed the Frontier AI Safety Commitments at the AI Seoul Summit on 21 May 2024, agreeing to publish safety frameworks and to hold back models whose severe risks they could not mitigate.

  7. Google pauses Gemini image generation of people

    Google stopped Gemini from generating images of people on 23 February 2024 after it produced racially diverse depictions of Nazi-era German soldiers and the US founding fathers. Senior vice president Prabhakar Raghavan said tuning for diversity had overgeneralized.

  8. Google launches Gemini, built to be multimodal from the start

    Google and Google DeepMind announced Gemini 1.0 on 6 December 2023 in three sizes, Ultra, Pro and Nano. Google described it as built to be multimodal from the start rather than adapted afterward, and said Ultra was the first model past human-expert performance on MMLU, at 90.0%.

  9. Geoffrey Hinton resigns from Google to speak about AI risk

    Geoffrey Hinton, a Turing Award winner for his work on deep learning and a vice president at Google, said on 1 May 2023 that he had left the company after a decade. He told The New York Times he wanted to speak freely about the risks of the systems he had helped build.

  10. Google merges Brain and DeepMind into Google DeepMind

    Google said on 20 April 2023 that it was combining the Brain team from Google Research with DeepMind into a single unit called Google DeepMind, led by DeepMind’s co-founder and chief executive Demis Hassabis. Google said the move would accelerate its progress in AI.

  11. Google fires the engineer who called LaMDA sentient

    Google fired the engineer Blake Lemoine on 22 July 2022. He had told executives that the company’s LaMDA conversational model had become sentient after extended chat sessions, and had been placed on paid administrative leave on 11 June for sharing confidential material.

  12. Google introduces PaLM, a 540-billion-parameter model

    Google Research introduced the Pathways Language Model on 4 April 2022, a 540-billion-parameter dense transformer trained across 6,144 TPU v4 chips using Google’s Pathways system. Google reported the best few-shot scores it had published on most of the benchmarks tested.

  13. Bender, Gebru and coauthors publish “Stochastic Parrots”

    Emily M. Bender, Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major and a coauthor writing as Shmargaret Shmitchell published “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?” at the ACM FAccT conference on 3 March 2021.

  14. Google fires Timnit Gebru after a dispute over an ethics paper

    Timnit Gebru, co-lead of Google’s Ethical AI team, said on 2 December 2020 that Google had forced her out over a paper it asked her to retract. Google said it accepted a resignation; Gebru said she had threatened to resign and was never given that choice.

  15. Google publishes BERT, a bidirectional language model

    Jacob Devlin, Ming-Wei Chang, Kenton Lee, and Kristina Toutanova published BERT on 11 October 2018, a transformer that pretrains representations of text by reading in both directions, then fine-tuned for particular tasks. Google released the code and weights the following month.

  16. Google publishes seven AI principles after Maven

    Sundar Pichai published seven principles for Google’s AI work on 7 June 2018, six days after the company said it would not renew Project Maven. They commit Google to avoid AI for weapons or mass surveillance and to assess projects for safety, fairness, and accountability.

  17. Google will not renew its Project Maven contract

    Google told employees on 1 June 2018 that it would not seek renewal of its contract supplying image-recognition tools to the Pentagon’s Project Maven program when it expired in 2019. More than 4,600 employees had signed a letter opposing the work, and about a dozen resigned.

  18. Google demonstrates Duplex placing phone calls at I/O

    At its I/O conference on 8 May 2018 Google demonstrated Duplex, an Assistant feature that telephones businesses to book appointments in a synthesized voice with pauses and filler words. Limited public testing followed in New York, Atlanta, Phoenix, and the San Francisco Bay Area.

  19. Google researchers publish “Attention Is All You Need”

    Eight researchers at Google posted a paper to arXiv describing the transformer, a network built on attention alone, with no recurrence. It reported 28.4 BLEU on the WMT 2014 English-to-German task, trained on eight GPUs in three and a half days.

  20. Five companies found the Partnership on AI

    Amazon, Facebook, IBM, Microsoft and Google’s DeepMind announced the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Society, a non-profit for best practice and public understanding, open to academic and civil-society members. Apple joined in January 2017.

  21. Google puts neural machine translation into production

    Google switched Google Translate’s Chinese-to-English pair to GNMT, an end-to-end deep LSTM system described in a companion paper by Yonghui Wu and 30 co-authors. Google said it cut translation errors by 55 to 85 percent on several language pairs.

  22. DeepMind publishes WaveNet, a model of raw audio

    DeepMind published WaveNet, a generative network that modeled raw audio waveforms directly. DeepMind said it closed more than half the quality gap between existing text-to-speech systems and recorded human speech, and that it also generated music.

  23. AlphaGo defeats Lee Sedol 4-1 in Seoul

    DeepMind’s AlphaGo won the last game of a five-game match against Lee Sedol in Seoul on 15 March 2016, taking the series 4-1. Lee, a nine-dan professional, won game four, the only game the program lost. The winner’s $1 million prize went to charity.

  24. Nature publishes the paper behind AlphaGo

    Nature published “Mastering the game of Go with deep neural networks and tree search” by David Silver, Demis Hassabis and 18 co-authors at Google DeepMind. It disclosed that AlphaGo had already beaten the European champion Fan Hui five games to nil in October 2015.

Releases

Date Release Maker Family Kind What it was
2026
Nano Banana 2 (Gemini 3.1 Flash Image) Google Gemini model Faster image generation, 512px to 4K, up to 5-character consistency, SynthID watermarking.
Gemini 3 as default AI Overviews model Google Gemini product Gemini 3 became the default model powering AI Overviews in Google Search globally.
Chrome “auto browse” (Gemini 3) Google product Agentic Chrome feature for handling multi-step tasks such as booking travel.
Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) Google product, open weights Open standard proposed for agentic commerce, covering discovery through checkout.
2024
Gemini 1.5 Pro Google Gemini model 1M-token context window in limited preview; broader availability expanded through the year.
2023
Bard Google product Public rollout in the US and UK, built on a lightweight version of LaMDA.
2022
Imagen Google paper Text-to-image diffusion model emphasizing photorealism; not publicly released
PaLM Google paper 540B-parameter dense transformer trained via the Pathways system
2019
XLNet Google, Carnegie Mellon paper, open weights Permutation-based autoregressive pretraining; reported better results than BERT on 20 tasks.
2018
BERT Google paper, open weights Bidirectional transformer pretraining. Became the standard baseline in language research; code and weights released in November.
Google Duplex Google product An Assistant feature that telephones businesses to book appointments. Demonstrated at I/O; limited public testing followed.
2017
Transformer (“Attention Is All You Need”) Google paper The architecture behind nearly every large language model since. Attention only, with no recurrence and no convolution.
2016
Google Neural Machine Translation (GNMT) Google paper A deep LSTM translation system, put into production on Google Translate for Chinese to English.