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) to Gemini 3.1 Pro (2026, AA index 57, tied #1). 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.
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
- 2026-04-02 Gemma 4 Open Models Released — Google
- 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