NLP Lineage

18 November 2025 · Reasoning

Gemini 3

Gemini 3

Google DeepMind

Date
18 November 2025
What the date marks
Model release
Kind
Model
Organisation
Google DeepMind
Access
API only
Threads
In the guided tour
Chapter 14. Where the threads meet now
Learning phases
3. API usage and prompting

A milestone: 2 later milestones descend directly from it, and its descendants reach 2 of the 10 threads. How levels are decided

Figures quoted here are reported by the organisation that built it, not independently verified.

Read the primary source (blog.google)

Full summary in progress. Until then, this page shows the milestone's record from the research data.

What it changed

Before it

OpenAI and Anthropic had traded the frontier between them through 2025.

The problem

Google's earlier generations trailed on agentic and coding work.

What it introduced

A frontier multimodal reasoning model with an agentic development platform alongside it.

Why it matters

It put Google clearly back at the frontier and reportedly triggered an internal emergency response at OpenAI.

What modern models inherit

A genuinely three-way frontier race.

What came next

Gemini 3 Deep Think and 3.1 in early 2026.

Before and after

The milestones it descends from, and the milestones that descend from it. Work developed alongside it is not counted. Weak links are left out unless you include them.

Before: where it came from

Gemini 3 has 37 documented ancestors across 9 chapters, reaching back to Recurrent networks in 1990. Showing its direct parents and the 14 turning points among them.

Gemini 3 has 37 documented ancestors across 9 chapters, reaching back to Recurrent networks in 1990. Showing all of them.

Gemini 3 has 70 recorded ancestors, including indirect ones, across 12 chapters, reaching back to Recurrent networks in 1990. Showing its direct parents and the 20 turning points among them.

Gemini 3 has 70 recorded ancestors, including indirect ones, across 12 chapters, reaching back to Recurrent networks in 1990. Showing all of them.

  1. 2025Gemini 3This milestone.
  2. 2025Gemini 2.5Gemini 3 built directly on thisChapter 12. Thinking longer
  3. 2024Gemini 2.0Gemini 2.5 built directly on thisChapter 14. Where the threads meet now
  4. 2024o1 Turning pointGemini 2.5 was influenced by thisChapter 12. Thinking longer
  5. 2024Gemini 1.5Gemini 3 was influenced by thisChapter 10. Reading more than you remember
  6. 2023Gemini 1.0Gemini 1.5 built directly on thisChapter 11. Seeing and hearing
  7. 2022PaLMGemini 1.0 succeeded thisChapter 5. Scale becomes a science
  8. 2022Chain of thought Turning pointo1 was influenced by thisChapter 12. Thinking longer
  9. 2020Vision TransformerGemini 1.0 was influenced by thisChapter 11. Seeing and hearing
  10. 2020GShard Turning pointGemini 1.5 was influenced by thisChapter 5. Scale becomes a science
  11. 2020GPT-3 Turning pointChain of thought was influenced by thisChapter 5. Scale becomes a science
  12. 2020Scaling laws Turning pointGPT-3 was influenced by thisChapter 5. Scale becomes a science
  13. 2019Sparse Transformer Turning pointGPT-3 built directly on thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  14. 2019GPT-2 Turning pointGPT-3 built directly on thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  15. 2019WebTextGPT-2 was influenced by thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  16. 2018BERT Turning pointVision Transformer was influenced by thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  17. 2018GPT-1BERT was influenced by thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  18. 2018ELMoBERT was influenced by thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  19. 2018ULMFiTBERT was influenced by thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  20. 2017CoVeELMo was influenced by thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  21. 2017Transformer Turning pointVision Transformer built directly on thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  22. 2017Sparse MoE Turning pointGShard built directly on thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  23. 2016Layer normTransformer built directly on thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  24. 2015Residual connectionsTransformer was influenced by thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  25. 2015LM pretraining Turning pointBERT was influenced by thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  26. 2015BPE tokenizationGPT-2 built directly on thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  27. 2015Luong attentionTransformer was influenced by thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  28. 2014AdamTransformer was influenced by thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  29. 2014GloVeELMo built directly on thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  30. 2014Seq2seq Turning pointTransformer built directly on thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  31. 2014Attention Turning pointTransformer built directly on thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  32. 2014GRU / encoder-decoderAttention built directly on thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  33. 2013word2vecELMo was influenced by thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  34. 2011NLP from scratchELMo was influenced by thisChapter 1. Language as probability
  35. 2003Neural LMNLP from scratch was influenced by this
    word2vec was influenced by this    Chapter 1. Language as probability
  36. 1997LSTM Turning pointSparse MoE built directly on thisChapter 1. Language as probability
  37. 1991Mixture of expertsSparse MoE built directly on thisChapter 1. Language as probability
  38. 1990Recurrent networksLSTM was influenced by thisChapter 1. Language as probability
  1. 2025Gemini 3This milestone.
  2. 2025Gemini 2.5Gemini 3 built directly on thisChapter 12. Thinking longer
  3. 2024Gemini 2.0Gemini 2.5 built directly on thisChapter 14. Where the threads meet now
  4. 2024Computer useGemini 2.0 was influenced by this (indirect influence)Chapter 13. Models that act
  5. 2024o1 Turning pointGemini 2.5 was influenced by thisChapter 12. Thinking longer
  6. 2024Claude 3.5 SonnetComputer use built directly on thisChapter 14. Where the threads meet now
  7. 2024Claude 3Claude 3.5 Sonnet built directly on thisChapter 14. Where the threads meet now
  8. 2024Gemini 1.5Gemini 3 was influenced by thisChapter 10. Reading more than you remember
  9. 2023Gemini 1.0Gemini 1.5 built directly on thisChapter 11. Seeing and hearing
  10. 2023GPT-4VComputer use was influenced by thisChapter 11. Seeing and hearing
  11. 2023Lost in the middleGemini 1.5 was influenced by this (indirect influence)Chapter 10. Reading more than you remember
  12. 2023Function callingComputer use was influenced by this (indirect influence)Chapter 13. Models that act
  13. 2023Process supervisiono1 was influenced by this (indirect influence)Chapter 12. Thinking longer
  14. 2023100K contextLost in the middle was influenced by this (indirect influence)Chapter 10. Reading more than you remember
  15. 2023GPT-4 Turning pointGPT-4V built directly on thisChapter 7. The assistant goes public
  16. 2023Claude100K context built directly on thisChapter 7. The assistant goes public
  17. 2023ToolformerFunction calling was influenced by this (indirect influence)Chapter 13. Models that act
  18. 2022Constitutional AIClaude built directly on thisChapter 6. Teaching models what people want
  19. 2022GPT-3.5 Turning pointGPT-4 succeeded thisChapter 7. The assistant goes public
  20. 2022ReActFunction calling was influenced by this (indirect influence)Chapter 13. Models that act
  21. 2022HH-RLHFClaude was influenced by thisChapter 6. Teaching models what people want
  22. 2022PaLMGemini 1.0 succeeded thisChapter 5. Scale becomes a science
  23. 2022STaRo1 was influenced by this (indirect influence)Chapter 12. Thinking longer
  24. 2022InstructGPT Turning pointGPT-4 built directly on thisChapter 6. Teaching models what people want
  25. 2022Chain of thought Turning pointo1 was influenced by thisChapter 12. Thinking longer
  26. 2021WebGPTReAct was influenced by this
    Toolformer was influenced by this    Chapter 13. Models that act
  27. 2021HHH assistantHH-RLHF built directly on thisChapter 6. Teaching models what people want
  28. 2021FLANInstructGPT was influenced by thisChapter 6. Teaching models what people want
  29. 2021CLIPGPT-4V was influenced by this (indirect influence)Chapter 11. Seeing and hearing
  30. 2020Vision TransformerGemini 1.0 was influenced by thisChapter 11. Seeing and hearing
  31. 2020RLHF for summarisation Turning pointHH-RLHF built directly on thisChapter 6. Teaching models what people want
  32. 2020GShard Turning pointGemini 1.5 was influenced by thisChapter 5. Scale becomes a science
  33. 2020GPT-3 Turning pointChain of thought was influenced by thisChapter 5. Scale becomes a science
  34. 2020RAGLost in the middle was influenced by thisChapter 10. Reading more than you remember
  35. 2020Dense retrievalRAG built directly on thisChapter 10. Reading more than you remember
  36. 2020Scaling laws Turning pointGPT-3 was influenced by thisChapter 5. Scale becomes a science
  37. 2019BARTRAG built directly on thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  38. 2019T5 Turning pointFLAN was influenced by thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  39. 2019C4 Turning pointT5 was influenced by thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  40. 2019RLHF for LMsRLHF for summarisation built directly on thisChapter 6. Teaching models what people want
  41. 2019Sparse Transformer Turning pointGPT-3 built directly on thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  42. 2019GPT-2 Turning pointGPT-3 built directly on thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  43. 2019WebTextGPT-2 was influenced by thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  44. 2019Transformer-XLSparse Transformer was influenced by this (indirect influence)Chapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  45. 2018BERT Turning pointVision Transformer was influenced by thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  46. 2018SentencePieceT5 built directly on thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  47. 2018GPT-1BERT was influenced by thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  48. 2018ELMoBERT was influenced by thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  49. 2018ULMFiTBERT was influenced by thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  50. 2017CoVeELMo was influenced by thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  51. 2017RLHF origino1 was influenced by this (indirect influence)Chapter 6. Teaching models what people want
  52. 2017Transformer Turning pointVision Transformer built directly on thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  53. 2017ConvS2STransformer was influenced by this (indirect influence)Chapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  54. 2017FAISSRAG was influenced by thisChapter 10. Reading more than you remember
  55. 2017Sparse MoE Turning pointGShard built directly on thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  56. 2016Layer normTransformer built directly on thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  57. 2015Residual connectionsTransformer was influenced by thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  58. 2015LM pretraining Turning pointBERT was influenced by thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  59. 2015BPE tokenizationGPT-2 built directly on thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  60. 2015Luong attentionTransformer was influenced by thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  61. 2014AdamTransformer was influenced by thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  62. 2014GloVeELMo built directly on thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  63. 2014Seq2seq Turning pointTransformer built directly on thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  64. 2014Attention Turning pointTransformer built directly on thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  65. 2014GRU / encoder-decoderAttention built directly on thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  66. 2013word2vecELMo was influenced by thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  67. 2011NLP from scratchELMo was influenced by thisChapter 1. Language as probability
  68. 2003Neural LMNLP from scratch was influenced by this
    word2vec was influenced by this    Chapter 1. Language as probability
  69. 1997LSTM Turning pointSparse MoE built directly on thisChapter 1. Language as probability
  70. 1991Mixture of expertsSparse MoE built directly on thisChapter 1. Language as probability
  71. 1990Recurrent networksLSTM was influenced by thisChapter 1. Language as probability

After: what it led to

Gemini 3 has 2 documented descendants across 2 chapters, reaching forward to Gemini 3.1 in 2026. Showing all of them.

Gemini 3 has 2 documented descendants across 2 chapters, reaching forward to Gemini 3.1 in 2026. Showing all of them.

Gemini 3 has 2 recorded descendants, including indirect ones, across 2 chapters, reaching forward to Gemini 3.1 in 2026. Showing all of them.

Gemini 3 has 2 recorded descendants, including indirect ones, across 2 chapters, reaching forward to Gemini 3.1 in 2026. Showing all of them.

  1. 2025Gemini 3This milestone.
  2. 2026Gemini 3 Deep Thinkbuilt directly on Gemini 3Chapter 12. Thinking longer
  3. 2026Gemini 3.1built directly on Gemini 3Chapter 14. Where the threads meet now
  1. 2025Gemini 3This milestone.
  2. 2026Gemini 3 Deep Thinkbuilt directly on Gemini 3Chapter 12. Thinking longer
  3. 2026Gemini 3.1built directly on Gemini 3Chapter 14. Where the threads meet now

Direct links and their sources

Where it came from

Built directly on

Influenced by

What it led to

Built on directly by

Developed alongside