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Google released its Gemini 3 AI model today after weeks of social-media hype, vague posting, and wink emojis. An early-morning leak of the Pro version’s model card—which outlines key details about the system and its benchmark performance—had developers posting on X as though Santa had arrived early. Even former OpenAI researcher and co-founder Andrej Karpathy joked about the buildup: “I heard Gemini 3 answers questions before you ask them. And that it can talk to your cat,” he wrote on X.
It remains to be seen, of course, whether the model lives up to the hype that it would, as one X user put it, “absolutely crush” all other state-of-the-art models, including OpenAI’s GPT-5 and Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4.5/Opus 4 and xAI’s Grok 4. But what is clear is that Google’s confident, widespread release of Gemini 3, in Pro and “Deep Think” versions, is a long way from its tentative debut of the first Gemini model in February 2024—when the company faced intense backlash over “woke” outputs and ahistorical or inaccurate images and text, ultimately admitting it had “missed the mark.” Its Gemini-powered AI Overviews in Search also triggered an online furor after the system famously told users to eat glue and rocks.
First time Google adds Gemini to Search on day one
This time around, Gemini 3 is getting a sweeping day-one rollout across a large swath of Google’s ecosystem with its billions of users—including its fastest-ever deployment into Google Search. “This is the very first time we’re shipping our latest Gemini model in search,” said Robby Stein, vice president of product for Google Search, in a press preview. That includes Google’s AI Pro and Ultra subscribers getting access to Gemini 3 in Search’s AI Mode, with new visual layouts featuring interactive tools and elements like images, tables and grids.
Google also benefits from the fact that, unlike during past AI rollouts, OpenAI didn’t manage to steal its thunder this time. OpenAI already debuted its massively hyped GPT-5 model in August — a release many observers said fell short and was underwhelming. Last week, the company released a 5.1 update it described as “smarter” and “more conversational,” with eight different “personalities” to choose from, but that still left the door wide open for Google to make Gemini waves.
In a blog post introducing Gemini 3, Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai boasted that Google’s AI Overviews now has 2 billion users per month, while the Gemini app has more than 650 million active monthly users, and more than 13 million developers are building with Gemini, Google’s “most intelligent model.” Today, he wrote, “we’re shipping Gemini at the scale of Google.”
Improvements on AI industry benchmarks and safety
Google also crowed about the model’s results on major AI industry benchmarks, saying that it beat the earlier Gemini 2.5 Pro on every major test of reasoning. It said the model performs extremely well on academic-style challenges testing logic, math, science, and problem-solving, reaching scores that Google claimed resemble “PhD-level” reasoning. It also said the model improved on factual accuracy.
Google also claimed the model is more thoughtful and useful in conversation: Instead of giving generic flattery or buzzword-filled answers—much-disliked features of many chatbot responses—it’s supposed to offer clearer, more direct insight.
In addition, Google said Gemini 3 has “undergone the most comprehensive set of safety evaluations of any Google AI model to date,” adding that the model shows “reduced sycophancy, increased resistance to prompt injections and improved protection against misuse via cyberattacks.” Over the past year, AI security experts have shared many examples of Gemini’s vulnerability to prompt injections, in which attackers manipulate the model by embedding malicious instructions into its input, and other types of threats.
Reassuring publishers
Amid rising publisher fears that Google’s AI Overviews are causing a “traffic apocalypse” that kills click-throughs to news sites, Google continued to insist that it will keep connecting users to publisher content. That reassurance comes despite research showing that users are less likely to click on result links when an AI summary appears—and that when AI summaries do surface sources, users rarely click through to them.
“We continue to send billions of clicks to the web every day, and we’re prominently highlighting the web in our Search AI experiences in a way that encourages onward exploration,” a Google spokesperson told Fortune by email. “As always, we continue to prominently display links to the web throughout the AI Mode response, so people can continue learning and exploring.”
Google also pointed to its “query fan-out technique”—essentially, taking a user’s single question and breaking it into many smaller, behind-the-scenes searches to gather more relevant information.
“Now, not only can it perform even more searches to uncover relevant web content, but because Gemini more intelligently understands your intent, it can find new content that it may have previously missed,” the spokesperson said. “This means Search can help you find even more highly relevant web content for your specific question.”
Google is playing to its strengths
No matter how Gemini 3 is received, there’s little question that Google is far ahead of where it stood less than three years ago, when ChatGPT’s arrival sparked an internal “code red.” The company is also playing to its strengths, looking directly at what its billions of consumers want—including unveiling first-of-its-kind generative shopping interfaces in the Gemini app with product listings, comparison tables and live pricing pulled from Google’s 50-billion-item Shopping Graph.
That, of course, is Google’s not-so-secret sauce: the massive amounts of data that flows through its products every day. And Gemini 3 is yet another reminder that few companies, if any, have the data foundation or the global reach to ship AI at this scale.
Still, even Pichai, the company’s CEO, is still urging caution when it comes to AI. In a new interview with the BBC, he said people should not “blindly trust” everything AI tools tell them, adding they are “prone to errors” and urging people to use them alongside other tools. Pichai also warned that no company would be immune if the AI bubble burst. Presumably even Google.
