On November 18, Google released the latest version of its AI chatbot, Gemini 3, aiming to keep up or surpass competitors like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. This update arrives eight months after the announcement of Gemini 2.5 and roughly two years after the initial launch of the model Gemini at the end of 2023. On the other hand, ChatGPT burst onto the scene a full year earlier in late 2022, setting a high standard that Google has been racing to meet ever since.
The Echo covered the first release of Gemini two years ago, when Google first signaled that the company will try to challenge ChatGPT’s dominance. Since then, Google has often struggled to match its rival’s performance, especially when it comes to creative writing and coding, as stated by G2. But with Gemini 3, the company appears to be making substantial progress.
Early reactions suggest that Gemini 3 may outperform ChatGPT in several areas. “I’ve used ChatGPT every day for 3 years. Just spent 2 hours on Gemini 3. I’m not going back. The leap is insane—reasoning, speed, images, video… everything is sharper and faster. It feels like the world just changed, again,” Salesforce founder and CEO Marc Benioff posted on X. Additionally, Tom’s Guide, after testing out 11 different prompts to compare each chatbot’s responses, concluded that Gemini 3 crushed ChatGPT with a score of seven to four.
Still, ChatGPT remains the world’s most widely used AI platform, boasting roughly 850 million monthly users, according to DemandSage. Gemini is second with more than 650 million.
According to Google, Gemini 3 is equipped with new updates, including improved reasoning, smarter interfaces, and the new Gemini Agent tool, describing the release as “a new era of intelligence.” Even before these new features, Gemini already had a significant advantage over ChatGPT, being built into and deeply integrated in many Google products people use every day, such as Chrome, Android, Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Maps. If Gemini 3 is now just as good as ChatGPT, many users may choose to stay with it simply because the AI assistant works smoothly with the tools they already use.
Gemini 3’s strong performance can have a broad impact across the AI industry, not just in the chatbot sector, but also in AI hardware. According to Yahoo Finance, Nvidia currently dominates the market of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), specialized chips used to train and run complex AI models serviced by big tech companies. Surging demand for these chips recently helped Nvidia become the world’s most valuable public company by market capitalization, surpassing both Apple and Alphabet, Google’s parent company. Nvidia reached this historic milestone on June 3rd and surpassed the $4 trillion valuation on June 9th, according to Yahoo Finance.
However, Google trains Gemini 3 on its own Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), according to CNBC. TPUs, like GPUs, are another type of AI chips specialized for AI and machine learning purposes without graphics function. If Gemini 3 performs strongly, it could reduce Google’s dependence on Nvidia and signal a growing challenge to Nvidia’s hardware dominance.
The stock market appears to reflect this narrative. Between November 18, the release date of Gemini 3, and November 28, Alphabet’s stock rose 12.1%, while Nvidia’s fell 5.2%, according to Google Finance.
While Gemini 3 shows a lot of promise, it is still too early to determine how well the AI model would perform compared to its competitors. OpenAI will likely release a more advanced version of ChatGPT, and the competition between the two companies will likely stay tight. Nvidia will also continue to play a major role in this race, since most AI companies still rely on its GPUs to train their models. As Google pushes its own TPUs and OpenAI looks for new hardware solutions, the battle among AI models may also become a battle over the hardware that powers them. With so many changes happening at once, user preferences may matter just as much as small performance differences when the top models remain neck and neck.
