DeepMind's Gemini Robotics 2.5 Hits 96% on Mercedes-Benz Line

DeepMind's new Gemini Robotics 2.5 model packed automotive parts at a 96% success rate in a real-world proof-of-concept at Mercedes-Benz, the company said on November 11 in an announcement reported by SiliconAngle that paired the robotics release with a new biology model.

Across more than 200 distinct tasks, DeepMind says the new version achieves a 30% to 100% success rate depending on the task and completes tasks 20% to 30% faster than the previous version's baseline. The range is wide on purpose: the model still misses on some tasks, even as it clears a commercial-grade bar on others.

The vision-language-action model builds on Argon, DeepMind's frontier LLM that rolled out in late September, and is billed as the company's most capable VLA to date for creating an "AI brain" for robotics. It is rolling out via partners Agile Robots SE, Apptronik and Boston Dynamics, and natively supports Apptronik's Apollo 2 humanoid and the Franka Duo platform with two-fingered parallel grippers.

"This is what we built Apollo for: useful work alongside people in real industrial settings," said Jeff Cardenas, Apptronik's co-founder and CEO.

DeepMind released a companion biology model the same day, AlphaGenome 2, which predicts how DNA sequences and their variations affect human cell types and now covers DNA methylation. Sarah Teichmann, co-founder of the Human Cell Atlas and professor of Stem Cell Medicine at the University of Cambridge, singled out "how it adapts directly to new single-cell data without retraining, predicting how DNA variants act in newly profiled cell states, and that it can adapt even from very small samples." The dual drop lands the same day as Google's Gemini Decisions API and healthcare-focused Gemini rollout, one of three DeepMind-stamped launches our tracker caught on November 11.