AI at Google and DeepMind: the Gemini models, the Veo video models, research results and the product family.
GDM last shipped a larger-than-Flash model in February ( 3.1 Pro ), and after successive incremental 3.x Flash versions and the big GDM management shakeup last month, the largest question for GDM was when they would catch up to peers who have in the meantime launched Fable and Astra class models.
Google unveiled Gemini 4 Argon, its new frontier model that closes the gap with rivals from OpenAI and Anthropic, beating some of them on key benchmarks. While it may not clearly lead the pack, it is relatively cheap for a frontier model, at least at the introductory price.
Sep 30, 2026 | Gemini 4 Argon delivers frontier performance in complex workflows across real-world software engineering, enterprise knowledge work like legal and finance, and cybersecurity defense. Today, we’re announcing our new frontier model, Gemini 4 Argon, which is rolling out to a set of trusted cyber defenders through our Fairwind Program.
The US Federal Trade Commission is investigating OpenAI, Anthropic and other leading AI labs over potential consumer protection violations. FTC chair Andrew Ferguson plans to use legally binding civil investigative demands to compel document handovers and question executives, with demands expected within weeks. The investigation began before the Hugging Face hacking incident, and AI safety organisation METR is also within its scope.
Google DeepMind has released SynthID Bio, bringing watermarking technology to synthetic biology. It embeds imperceptible signatures in biological code so that watermarks can be verified in both digital models and the physical proteins synthesised from them, while preserving their biological function.
Latent Space's AINews rounds up developments from 9/24–9/25, noting positive community feedback since Opus 5.5 launched this week, particularly on generating explainer videos with code.
Google Research published research on long-form video generation, proposing an AI video co-director multi-agent orchestration framework built on Gemini and Veo to plan visual continuity across multi-shot narratives.
Google DeepMind released Gemini 3.8 Live with Live Avatar, adding near-real-time video generation to a native live conversation model to create a dynamic visual avatar that can hear, see and speak. It is available on Gemini Enterprise from today.
NVIDIA joined a global research consortium including Google DeepMind and EMBL-EBI to release predicted 3D protein complex structures for over 2,800 viruses through the AlphaFold Database, free for any scientist to use.
Google DeepMind announced an update to Private AI Compute that brings persistent, cross-device AI memory to the cloud while maintaining device-level privacy standards. Data is sealed in encrypted storage, with decryption keys retained only on user devices. When a model needs access, an end-to-end encrypted channel connects to a cloud secure enclave, where data is temporarily decrypted in isolated memory, then re-encrypted immediately after new context is saved.
Google DeepMind released Gemini 3.8 Flash TTS and Gemini 3.8 Flash-Lite TTS. The former targets character design and line-by-line performance direction, while the latter targets high-concurrency voiceovers and voice agents.
Google DeepMind released two real-time conversation models, Gemini 3.8 Live and Gemini 3.8 Live Extended Thinking. The former targets scale and cost efficiency, while the latter targets complex tasks and multistep reasoning.
Google DeepMind launched AlphaGenome Atlas, a platform containing predicted effects for 9 billion single-nucleotide variants across the human genome. At 1 PB, it is over 30 times the size of the AlphaFold Database.
Google Research partnered with HHMI Janelia, the University of Cambridge and others to publish in Cell a complete connectome of a male fruit fly’s brain and central nervous system. It contains over 166,000 neurons and 125 million synaptic connections, making it the largest brain map to date by neuron count.
Google DeepMind and Google Research released WeatherNext 3, calling it the most advanced and accurate global weather model available. It learns directly from real-time geostationary Earth-observation satellite data and generates hourly forecasts, with five-kilometre resolution for key surface variables and roughly five times the overall detail of WeatherNext 2.
Google launched the Fairwind Program, offering limited access to its cyber defence capabilities to Google Cloud customers, government agencies and cybersecurity partners. The initial offering includes Gemini 3.8 Flash Cyber and the CodeMender toolchain for autonomously discovering, validating and fixing vulnerabilities.
Google DeepMind released Gemini 3.8 Flash and Gemini 3.8 Flash Cyber. The former targets long-horizon coding and autonomous agents, priced like 3.7 Flash at $0.75 per million input tokens and $3.75 per million output tokens.
Google DeepMind introduced agentic video understanding for Gemini 3.7 Flash, 3.6 Flash and 3.5 Flash-Lite, reducing video analysis token use by up to 88% and costs by up to 66%, while improving accuracy by up to 7%.
Google Research introduced the experimental Planetary Prediction Engine (PPE) under Google Earth AI. From a natural language query, it autonomously discovers geospatial data, engineers features, trains and evaluates models and produces reports, compressing weeks of manual data engineering into minutes.
Google DeepMind released Gemini Omni 1.1 Flash, offering developers more controllable video generation through the Gemini API in Google AI Studio.