Google: A new era of discovery — Google Research at I/O 2026

At the I/O 2026 developer conference, Google, through its Google Research division, presented a series of announcements under the title “A New Era of Discovery”. The focus is on tools that accelerate scientific research, but the announcement also covers health AI, quantum computing and weather forecasting.

Which tools accelerate scientific discovery?

The central systems are Empirical Research Assistance (ERA) and Co-Scientist. ERA is a system that optimizes code and, through iterative search, “proposes new concepts, writes code and evaluates the results”. It has helped in discoveries from neuroscience to cosmology, including the prediction of hospital admissions and seasonal water runoff.

Co-Scientist is a multi-agent system for collaborative research that scientists have applied to antimicrobial resistance and liver fibrosis.

What does Gemini for Science bring?

The Gemini for Science suite introduces three new tools for researchers. Computational Discovery is an agentic research engine, Hypothesis Generation serves to discuss and evaluate research ideas, and Literature Insights synthesizes scientific findings from the literature.

Advances in health and quantum computing

In health, the standout is MedGemma, an open foundation model for medical text and images, which has surpassed five million downloads. The AMIE system demonstrated work with medical history, lab results and complex images.

On the quantum front, the Willow chip achieved verifiable quantum advantage by running the Quantum Echoes algorithm 13,000 times faster than classical supercomputers. The REPLIQA initiative brings 10 million dollars for five universities applying quantum science to the life sciences.