Google’s Gemini 3 was released Tuesday to widespread fanfare. The company called the model a “new era of intelligence,” integrating it into Google Search on day one for the first time. It’s blown past OpenAI and other competitors’ products on a range of benchmarks and is topping the charts on LMArena, a crowdsourced AI evaluation platform that’s essentially the Billboard Hot 100 of AI model ranking. Within 24 hours of its launch, more than one million users tried Gemini 3 in Google AI Studio and the Gemini API, per Google. “From a day one adoption standpoint, [it’s] the best we’ve seen from any of our model releases,” Google DeepMind’s Logan Kilpatrick, who is product lead for Google’s AI Studio and the Gemini API, told The Verge.
Even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and xAI CEO Elon Musk publicly congratulated the Gemini team on a job well done. And Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff wrote that after using ChatGPT every day for three years, spending two hours on Gemini 3 changed everything: “Holy shit … 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.”
“This is more than a leaderboard shuffle,” said Wei-Lin Chiang, cofounder and CTO of LMArena. Chiang told The Verge that Gemini 3 Pro holds a “clear lead” in occupational categories including coding, match, and creative writing, and its agentic coding abilities “in many cases now surpass top coding models like Claude 4.5
