AI research division
Appears in 19 stories
Parent of Isomorphic Labs, which raised $2.1 billion in May 2026 and expects its first AI-designed clinical candidates in human trials by end-2026
In January 2026, Tsinghua University researchers published DrugCLIP in Science, a system that screened 500 million drug compounds against 10,000 human proteins in under 24 hours on eight GPUs. The approach is 10 million times faster than conventional molecular docking, and the results are public in GenomeScreenDB, covering roughly half the human genome.
Updated Jun 27
Fastest-growing rival to ChatGPT in consumer share
ChatGPT receives roughly a billion visits a month, and on May 5 those visitors began talking to a different model by default. OpenAI replaced GPT-5.3 Instant—the everyday workhorse it shipped earlier this year—with GPT-5.5 Instant, a faster system the company says produces 52.5% fewer hallucinated claims on medical, legal, and financial questions. The new model can also pull context from a user's past chats, uploaded files, and Gmail to personalize answers, and it appears in OpenAI's developer interface as 'chat-latest.'
Updated May 31
Former employer of founder; also a backer of the new lab
In April 2026, London AI lab Ineffable Intelligence raised $1.1 billion at a $5.1 billion valuation, the largest seed round in European history. The founder, David Silver, is a University College London professor who led Google DeepMind's AlphaGo and AlphaZero, programs that learned board games entirely through self-play.
Releasing foundation models for robotics at accelerating pace
For decades, industrial robots have been powerful but rigid. Google DeepMind's Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6, released April 14, 2026, is the latest version of a new approach: it gives robots the flexible reasoning that powers chatbots, tailored to understand and act in physical space. Paired with an agentic vision system, it reads pressure gauges, thermometers, and digital readouts with 98% accuracy—a capability that emerged from collaboration with Boston Dynamics, which deploys the Spot robot in industrial facilities.
Gemma 4 integrated into Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform at Google Cloud Next 2026; enterprise compliance deployment now generally available
For two years, the most capable artificial intelligence models lived behind paywalls and API meters. Google made that harder to justify on April 2, 2026, when it released Gemma 4: four open models ranging from 2 billion to 31 billion parameters. The models handle text, images, video, and audio under a fully permissive Apache 2.0 license with no usage restrictions. The competitive response was nearly immediate. Meta released Llama 5 just six days later, significantly ahead of its previously signaled Q3 2026 target. Chinese lab DeepSeek followed on April 24 with its V4 model, a 1.6 trillion-parameter system also shipped as open-source under an MIT license. What began as a bilateral licensing contest between Google and Meta has become a six-way open-model race.
Updated May 30
Developer and operator of the AI Co-Scientist
Google released an AI system in February 2025 that proposes original hypotheses and refines them through internal debate among six specialized AI agents. The system reproduced a decade-long Imperial College London study on how antibiotic-resistance genes spread between bacterial species in 48 hours, without accessing their unpublished findings.
Operating Big Sleep vulnerability agent; reported 20 zero-days by August 2025
For decades, finding security flaws in software has required expensive human experts or pattern-matching tools that miss complex bugs. In five months, all three frontier artificial intelligence labs (OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google) released autonomous agents that read code like a human researcher, discover vulnerabilities traditional scanners miss, and generate patches. On March 6, 2026, OpenAI launched Codex Security in research preview, an agent that scanned 1.2 million code commits in its first month of beta testing and discovered 14 previously unknown vulnerabilities serious enough to receive formal identifiers in OpenSSH, Chromium, and PHP.
Developer of AlphaFold series; released AlphaFold 4 in March 2026
Determining the three-dimensional shape of a protein used to take a graduate student an entire career. Google DeepMind released AlphaFold 4 in March 2026, extending progress from the original AlphaFold's 2018 win, with the system predicting multi-protein structures in minutes instead of hours or days.
Developer of AlphaFold, the foundational precedent for biological AI
It took thirteen years and $2.7 billion to read the first human genome. Now a single AI model, trained on 9 trillion DNA base pairs from more than 128,000 species, can predict whether an uncharacterized mutation in a breast cancer gene is dangerous with 90 percent accuracy without being trained on that gene.
Developed AlphaProof and AlphaEvolve systems contributing to mathematical discovery
For the first time, AI systems are independently solving mathematical problems that stumped human researchers for decades. Since Christmas 2025, 15 legendary Erdős problems have moved from 'open' to 'solved'—11 by AI, including the first on January 6, 2026, from OpenAI's GPT-5.2 Pro and Harmonic's Aristotle theorem prover.
Updated May 29
Developer of Gemini model family
OpenAI launched the first commercial reasoning model in September 2024. Seventeen months later, Google's upgraded Gemini 3 Deep Think pulled ahead on the benchmarks that matter most for science.
Expanded materials database, validating predictions through partner labs
A new generation of AI systems can now design, execute, and analyze materials experiments with minimal human involvement. In January 2026, researchers at China's Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology published MARS, a system that coordinates 19 large language model agents with robotic platforms.
Updated May 26
Released AlphaGenome source code for non-commercial use
For twenty years after scientists sequenced the human genome, 98% of it remained essentially unreadable. The protein-coding genes were mapped, but the vast regulatory regions—the genome's operating system—stayed opaque. On January 28, 2026, Google DeepMind released the full source code for AlphaGenome, an artificial intelligence model that predicts how genetic variants in these non-coding regions affect gene regulation and disease.
Collaborative partner; maintains Montreal research office
For decades, creativity was considered AI's final frontier—the one domain where machines could never match human ingenuity. That assumption just cracked.
Updated May 23
Technical leader in mathematical reasoning and multimodal capabilities
OpenAI's GPT-5 dropped August 7, 2025, completing AI's shift from chatbots that string words together to systems that think through problems step-by-step. Google DeepMind's models won the International Math Olympiad by solving problems only five humans cracked, as Anthropic's Claude, Meta's Llama, and every major AI lab raced to build reasoning models.
Updated May 19
Leading AGI race with Gemini 3, now 'engine room' of Google's AI efforts
In May 2025, DeepMind's AlphaEvolve became the first commercial AI to optimize its own training—shaving 23% off a critical computation kernel. Since then, the loop has tightened: by April 2026, Anthropic's Claude agents were outperforming human alignment researchers on safety experiments, and GPT-5.5 had rewritten its own serving infrastructure to run 20% faster.
Opening first automated laboratory in UK 2026; partnering with U.S. DOE on Genesis
Science magazine named large language models doing frontier science a runner-up breakthrough of 2025. Within weeks, the prediction became reality: OpenAI's GPT-5.2 solved previously unsolved Erdős mathematics problems in 15 minutes, achieving 40% accuracy on expert-level mathematics that stumped earlier systems.
Builder of Gemini
Sundar Pichai opened Google I/O 2026 with a Gemini model that can run a user's desktop. The keynote unveiled Android XR smart glasses too. Aluminium OS, a laptop platform merging Android and ChromeOS, will ship as 'Googlebooks' from Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP, and Lenovo.
Building Gemini models and pushing them into products at faster cadence.
The rollout didn't stop at "Flash is the default." In the days after launch, Google filled in the missing contract with developers. Gemini 3 Flash Preview is now explicitly priced in the Gemini API, with context caching rates, batch pricing, and a note that Gemini 3-era Search grounding will begin billing on January 5, 2026.
Updated May 15
No stories match your search
Try a different keyword
How would you like to describe your experience with the app today?
