Quick answers first. When did Veo 3 come out? Veo 3 came out in May 2025, unveiled at Google I/O. Veo 3.1 followed in October 2025. Veo 2 shipped in December 2024, the original Veo was announced in May 2024, and the newest generation — Veo 4 — is Google’s current flagship. Veo 5 does not exist yet: Google has not announced it.
Release-date searches around Veo spike for a reason: Google ships generations fast enough that "the new Veo" changes meaning every few months, and old articles rank long after their facts expire. A post calling Veo 3 "Google’s new video AI" is now several releases out of date. This page is the corrected, dated record.
It also settles the forward-looking questions — when is Veo 4 coming out (it is already out), is there a Veo 5 (not yet), what the "veo 3 update" actually was — and notes which releases you can generate with today. On Veo AI, that is Veo 4 and Veo 3.1, running in the browser on free starter credits.
The full Veo release timeline
One table, every generation, with the headline change each release carried. Dates are announcement dates; broad availability sometimes trailed by weeks as Google widened access country by country.
| Version | Release date | Headline change | Status today |
|---|---|---|---|
| Veo 1 | Announced May 2024 (Google I/O) | First generation — research preview | Never broadly available |
| Veo 2 | December 2024 | First wide release; realistic physics, no audio | Retired |
| Veo 3 | May 2025 (Google I/O) | Native audio: dialogue, ambience, effects | Superseded by 3.1 |
| Veo 3.1 | October 2025 | Keyframes, reference images, extension, richer audio | Active — on Veo AI |
| Veo 4 | Current flagship (newest generation) | Top fidelity, motion, and sound | Active — on Veo AI |
| Veo 5 | Not announced | — | Does not exist yet |
Veo 1 — May 2024: the proof of concept
Google introduced the original Veo at I/O in May 2024 as DeepMind’s answer to the text-to-video wave Sora had set off that February. It handled 1080p generation and understood filmmaking vocabulary, but access stayed locked to a waitlisted preview and select creators.
Its real role was declarative: it committed Google publicly to the video-generation race. Almost nobody outside Google ever generated with Veo 1, and no product today runs it — but every later release date on this page traces back to that announcement.
Veo 2 — December 2024: Veo goes public
Seven months later, Veo 2 turned the research project into something people could use. It reached consumers through Google Labs and later the Gemini app, and developers through the API, generating 8-second clips that reviewers rated above every rival of the moment for physical plausibility.
Its ceiling was silence — Veo 2 produced no audio of any kind, so every clip needed a sound pass in an editor. That gap defined the agenda for the next release, and it is why our Veo 2 vs Veo 3 comparison reads the way it does.
Veo 3 — May 2025: the audio generation
To repeat the snippet-worthy fact: Veo 3 was released in May 2025, announced on stage at Google I/O. It is the release most people mean by "the new Google video AI", and the one that made AI video mainstream — because it generated sound and picture together. Characters spoke with synced lips, scenes carried ambience and effects, and the clips flooding social feeds that summer suddenly felt complete.
Veo 3 also answered the availability complaints of the Veo 2 era, rolling out through Flow and the Gemini app to paying users in a growing list of countries — US first, then far wider. Searches like "is veo 3 available to the public" date from those staggered months; today the answer is simply yes, including subscription-free access on Veo AI.
Veo 3.1 — October 2025: the control release
Veo 3.1 arrived in October 2025 — this is the "veo 3 update" people search for. Rather than a reinvention, it was a control-surface release: first-and-last-frame keyframes, reference images for keeping a character or product consistent across shots, clip extension into sequences, and noticeably richer audio generation.
Those features turned one-shot prompting into something closer to directing, which is why Veo 3.1 remains the workhorse of the family even with Veo 4 above it. On Veo AI it runs in three tiers — Pro, Fast, and the audio-free budget Lite — at 720p or 1080p, 16:9 or 9:16, in 4, 6, or 8-second clips.
Veo 4 — the current flagship
Veo 4 is the newest generation of Veo and Google’s current flagship, sitting at the top of the family for realism, motion quality, and sound. If you searched "veo 4 release date" or "when is veo 4 coming out" expecting a countdown: it is already out, and you can generate with it right now.
On Veo AI, Veo 4 comes in Pro and Fast variants with the full modern feature set — native audio, image-to-video, keyframes, reference images, negative prompts, and extension. It is the default answer to "what is the new Veo", and the model to pick when output quality matters more than credit cost.
Veo 5 — the honest status
There is no Veo 5. Google has not announced a fifth generation, published a date, opened a waitlist, or teased one — searches for "veo 5" and "google veo 5" reflect anticipation, not a product. (If your "veo 5" search was about shampoo, that is a hair-care brand with no connection to any of this.)
Anticipation is reasonable, though, because the cadence is real: Google has shipped a major Veo release roughly every five to seven months since May 2024, usually anchoring the biggest ones to I/O in May. A successor to Veo 4 is a question of when, not if — but until Google says the words, every date you see attached to Veo 5 is invented.
Treat that as a scam filter. Any site today selling "Veo 5 access", early invites, or leaked builds is fake by definition — there is nothing to access. The safe pattern is the one that already worked for Veo 3.1 and Veo 4: when a new generation actually ships, Veo AI adds it to the catalog quickly, and your existing account and credits simply gain a new model. Until then, the practical move is generating with Veo 4, the strongest Veo that exists.
Which Veo should you use right now?
The release history collapses into a simple present: two generations matter. Veo 4 (Pro or Fast) is the flagship for maximum quality; Veo 3.1 (Pro, Fast, or the silent Lite tier) is the proven, cheaper workhorse. Everything older is retired, and everything newer is unannounced.
Both current generations run on Veo AI alongside 42 models total — Sora 2, Kling, Hailuo, Wan, and more — with pay-as-you-go credits and plans at /pricing, watermark-free downloads, and free starter credits on sign-up. Whatever "new veo" means by the time you read this, this is where it will be runnable.