The year 2025 was a pretty important one for the AI industry, with new AI models, apps, and tools being introduced.
Meta also created a new AI division, dubbed Superintelligence, in 2025
Photo Credit: Unsplash/Christopher Gower
The year 2025 was dominated by a handful of artificial intelligence (AI) launches that broke out of research labs and into mainstream conversation. Google pushed its generative AI portfolio into images and language reasoning with Nano Banana, OpenAI turned video generation into a social-first app with Sora, Perplexity expanded its browser ambitions with Comet, and Meta reorganised its long-term AI research under a new Superintelligence division. These announcements stood out not just for what they built, but for how quickly the technology categories themselves shifted in the public eye.
Google introduced Nano Banana in August 2025 as part of the Gemini 2.5 model family, focusing on AI-powered image generation and editing. The model was released under the name Gemini 2.5 Flash Image, and became colloquially known as Nano Banana due to its viral spread and wide usage in online communities. As per Google, the model is designed to create images from natural language prompts and also edit uploaded images using the same interface.
Google's Nano Banana is integrated directly inside the Gemini app on mobile and desktop, allowing users to generate visuals, modify backgrounds, adjust clothing or objects, and add multilingual text inside images. Google says the image model uses SynthID, a watermarking system that embeds a digital signature into AI-generated images for provenance tracking.
OpenAI launched the Sora mobile app in 2025, turning its diffusion-based text-to-video model into a consumer-facing creative tool. Sora lets users input text prompts or reference images and generate short videos with motion and sound. The model can create clips up to 60 seconds long, simulating movement based on the prompt context.
The Sora app rollout included a high-profile, multi-year, $1 billion agreement with The Walt Disney Company, allowing Sora users to include select licensed Disney characters from franchises such as Star Wars and Pixar in generated videos. OpenAI and Disney announced the collaboration in December 2025.
OpenAI said the app is available on iOS and will soon be released on Android, and users can share generated videos directly within supported social feeds, a move that made Sora feel more like a media tool than a developer API demo.
Perplexity AI announced Comet, its first-of-its-kind AI browser, in 2025. The browser launched on Windows and macOS in July, followed by an Android release in November 2025. As per Perplexity, Comet merges traditional browsing with an AI agent that can summarise webpages, answer questions inside the browsing context, and interpret links or page content without switching tabs.
Perplexity says Comet is built on Chromium, meaning it inherits compatibility with Chrome extensions and the Blink rendering engine. The browser includes Perplexity's conversational AI search assistant, branded separately from Google or OpenAI models.
Google launched Gemini 3 in late 2025 as the company's next-generation multimodal language model family, including variants such as Gemini 3 Pro, Gemini 3 Flash, and Gemini 3 DeepThink. Google says Gemini 3 Pro is optimised for complex reasoning tasks across language and images, while Gemini 3 Flash is a lower-latency variant designed for faster responses.
Gemini 3 models are available via the Gemini API on Google Cloud, and also power parts of the Gemini chatbot experience on mobile devices.
Gemini 3 Flash, released one month later, gained attention for becoming a low-latency feature in Google's AI Mode rollout, where it was surfaced in the browser interface for tasks such as summaries and AI-assisted search.
Meta reorganised its long-term AI research efforts under Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL) in 2025. The division consolidated teams previously spread across Meta AI research groups. As per Meta's announcement, MSL is focused on advanced AI research, infrastructure and large-scale model development, and is led by Alexandr Wang, who previously founded Scale AI.
Meta said the lab is not a product launch division, but a research-first unit dedicated to long-term work on AI systems that could eventually exceed human-level capabilities across domains.
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