With Gemini 3, Google Keeps the AI Hype Train Rolling — For Now

The artificial intelligence landscape is steadily tilting in Google’s favor with the arrival of Gemini 3. As the latest member of the Gemini model family, Gemini 3 builds on its predecessors to make massive strides in reasoning, multimodality and web coding, according to the company. In fact, a Google blog post reveals that Gemini 3 vastly outperforms its GPT and Claude counterparts in areas like academic reasoning, visual reasoning, challenging math problems and screen understanding.

This news has some declaring that Google already has OpenAI and Anthropic beat in the AI race, despite the recent wave of momentum both startups have been riding. Given the early hype around Gemini 3, it’s fair to wonder whether Google is officially at the forefront of AI innovation and whether its newest model is simply taking the industry one step closer to popping a potential AI bubble.

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What Is Gemini 3?

Gemini 3 is Google’s most recent large language model to join the Gemini lineage. The model leverages the progress made by previous Gemini models in multimodal processing, agentic AI and complex reasoning, combining these capabilities with unprecedented reasoning and problem-solving abilities. 

Google has also made it clear that Gemini 3 is the future of its AI strategy, immediately rolling out the model across its product suite. Gemini 3 now powers the Gemini app for all users, and it’s available in Google Search’s AI Mode for those who subscribe to the Google AI Pro or Ultra plans. Meanwhile, developers can work with the model in the Gemini API on Google’s new agentic platform called AI Studio, while businesses can access it via the Vertex AI and Gemini Enterprise platforms. 

What Can Gemini 3 Do?

Gemini 3 is making headlines for its reasoning capabilities, but the model offers several other noteworthy features as well. 

Enhanced Reasoning

Gemini 3 stands out for its “state-of-the-art reasoning,” surpassing its competitors in numerous categories. For instance, the model scored 37.5 percent on Humanity’s Last Exam, a test that assesses academic reasoning. To compare, Claude Sonnet 4.5 scored 13.7 percent and GPT 5.1 scored 26.5 percent. Gemini 3 also leads the way in multimodal understanding and reasoning, boasting a score of 81 percent versus Sonnet 4.5’s 68 percent and GPT 5.1’s 76 percent. 

This all means that Gemini 3 can capture a deeper level of nuance in prompts than other models, enabling it to solve more complicated problems and better understand the context behind user queries. This makes it useful for a variety of tasks, including analyzing academic papers, interpreting images and providing insights after watching videos.   

Deep Thinking

Deep Think mode gives Gemini 3 the extra boost it needs to solve even more intellectually challenging problems. In addition to excelling at academic reasoning, the model performs well on benchmarks rating scientific knowledge and visual reasoning. These abilities lay the foundation for Gemini 3 to solve problems that it’s never faced before while engaging in conversations with users involving text, images, audio, video or code. 

Vibe Coding

Google describes Gemini 3 as its best model for vibe coding, or the practice of submitting a natural language query to an AI tool and letting it generate the code line by line on its own. More impressive, though, is the model’s ability to control a computer through a terminal. This means that AI agents can take over more coding workflows, promising greater autonomy and productivity among developers. 

Long-Term Planning

Gemini 3 also underwent the Vending-Bench 2 test, which gauges how well AI models can run a simulated vending machine company over the course of a year. Currently, Gemini 3 is ranked number one, saving the most money in its bank account. As a result, the model has managed to handle tasks that involve longer-term planning, from categorizing emails to finding a service and scheduling a future appointment.

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What Does Gemini 3 Mean for the AI Race? 

The pressure to win the AI race has grown even more palpable with the release of Gemini 3, which comes barely a week after OpenAI’s GPT 5.1 and less than two months after Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4.5. However, the arrival of Gemini 3 may sting OpenAI more, considering that Google has described its model as “another big step on the path toward AGI.” 

OpenAI has long pursued artificial general intelligence (AGI), or AI that can learn and think like humans. GPT-5 was actually supposed to signal meaningful progress toward this goal, but the model fell short of expectations. Losing out to Google as the first company to achieve AGI would certainly be a sore spot for OpenAI’s leadership. 

After all, OpenAI’s recent momentum seemed to position it well in the AI industry, with promising ventures in robotics, consumer hardware and web browsing in the works, as well as more data centers on the horizon. Yet this momentum is what deemed OpenAI and ChatGPT to be legitimate competition to Google in the eyes of U.S. District Court Judge Amit P. Mehta, who refrained from breaking up Google’s empire in its antitrust case. 

Ironically, this decision has enabled Google to regain its footing in the AI race. The tech giant continues to rake in revenue from its search and cloud businesses to fund its AI initiatives, while controlling the entire AI development process. OpenAI has tried to match this by establishing partnerships in different areas like the cloud, infrastructure and hardware — but it’s not the same as owning every step of production. As a result, Gemini 3 reflects Google’s main advantage over OpenAI, and could mark the turning point where Google reasserts its tech dominance.

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Is Gemini 3 Further Inflating an AI Bubble?

Gemini 3 is likely going to elicit even greater AI investments from OpenAI, which has already committed more than $1 trillion in future spending. Other companies are likely to pile on to the billions of dollars they’ve thrown at AI as well, raising the possibility that all this buzz is contributing to a market bubble. In fact, Google CEO Sundar Pichai told the BBC that users can’t “blindly trust” AI-generated content and admitted that AI models are “prone to errors,” casting doubt on whether the technology is worth all this spending. 

At the same time, Google may be better prepared than any other company to survive if the bubble bursts. Google’s lucrative revenue streams give investors confidence that its AI investments are sustainable, and its extensive enterprise has allowed it to forgo the circular financing OpenAI and others have relied on in an attempt to tighten their grip on the AI industry. If the AI bubble does pop, Google could very well be the only AI company left standing, while its competitors get dragged down in a web of circular deals that set the industry up for a sudden collapse.

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