How Google leapfrogged ChatGPT – and why the AI race may already be over

When Google unveiled its latest artificial intelligence model in November – three years after the launch of rival ChatGPT – the tech giant described it as a “new era of intelligence”. Gemini 3 was faster, better at reasoning, and achieved a record score in Humanity’s Last Exam – a test designed by AI safety researchers to identify artificial intelligence that can meet or surpass human intelligence.

Google’s announcement contained the same kind of bombast that has become common with the launch of new models from major AI firms – but this time it seemed different.

Early users were quick to spot that the new AI model was not just an iterative update, but a whole new way of using the technology. Marc Benioff, the chief executive of tech company Salesforce, described the leap in “reasoning, speed, images, video… everything” as “insane”.

In a post to X, he wrote: “I’ve used ChatGPT every day for three years. Just spent two hours on Gemini 3. I’m not going…