What is Google Gemini? What you need to know

Google’s Gemini is a family of multimodal AI models that power chatbots, device assistants, and Workspace tools, replacing older systems like Bard. The latest 3.7 series includes models such as 3.7 Flash, which offers a 1 million-token context window, reasoning capabilities, and improved efficiency over earlier versions. These models are designed to handle text, images, audio, and video inputs, enabling tasks like image analysis, data visualization, and code generation. Google integrates these models across its ecosystem, including Android devices, Workspace apps, and developer APIs.

The 3.7 Flash model is positioned as a frontier model rather than a low-cost alternative, outperforming some benchmarks while operating faster and at lower cost than older models. Google also introduced a cybersecurity-focused variant, 3.5 Flash Cyber, trained for vulnerability detection and patching, currently available to governments and partners. The flagship 3.1 Pro model remains Google’s most advanced, excelling in complex coding and reasoning tasks, though its successor, 3.5 Pro, has faced delays.

Gemini models use transformer architectures and mixture-of-experts approaches, with Google emphasizing long context windows and reasoning capabilities. The 3.5 Flash-Lite variant prioritizes cost efficiency and agentic tasks, including computer use, while the 3.7 series expands multimodal input handling, such as generating videos from text, image, audio, or video prompts.

Google markets these models as capable of running efficiently across devices, from smartphones to data centers, with varying parameter sizes affecting performance and resource requirements. The rapid iteration and rebranding history of Gemini reflect Google’s ongoing efforts to refine and expand its AI offerings, though specifics on model architectures and differences remain largely undisclosed.