Google’s announcement of Gemini 3 received a rare applause from some of its fiercest competitors, even as the benchmark battle intensified within hours.
Gemini 3, Google’s most powerful and capable AI model to date, brought kudos from executives who hardly ever extend congratulations.
Sundar Pichai’s enthusiastic “Geminiii” on X, formerly known as Twitter, earned a friendly “Congrats” from Elon Musk. DeepMind chief Demis Hassabis got several “Nice Work” responses from the xAI founder.
Sam Altman, whose OpenAI models are direct rivals to Google’s AI bots, joined in, “Congrats to Google on Gemini 3! Looks like a great model.”
The brief wave of goodwill stood out in an industry where rivalry typically overshadows praise.
The celebratory tone quickly turned competitive. A post showed Gemini 3 Pro easily overtaking xAI’s Grok 4.1 Thinking, which had topped performance charts only a day prior. Musk acknowledges the dethroning with a familiar wink, “Congrats indeed! I guess we will have to release 4.20 soon.”
The ‘4.20’ reference, one of Musk’s running jokes, was a signal that xAI might try to hurry along its next release to catch up. Social media commenters noted that Grok had enjoyed ‘just one day in the sun’ before Google took the benchmark crown back. OpenAI’s GPT-4.5 sits in the number 8 spot on LMArena’s leaderboard currently.
Gemini 3 will arrive nearly two years after the first generation of Gemini models were released in response to ChatGPT. It comes with a lot more powerful reasoning, multimodal, and autonomous task performance capabilities. Pichai labelled Google’s ‘most intelligent model’, underlining its importance in the company’s AI roadmap.
The rollout was just as aggressive: for the first time, Google integrated its new flagship model directly into Search on launch day, while it also expanded instantly across the Gemini’s app’s 650 million monthly users, as well as developer-focused platforms like AI Studio and Vertex AI.
Along with the model, Google simultaneously announced Google Antigravity, an agentic development suite for fully autonomous coding tasks, and Gemini 3 Deep Think for complex problem-solving.
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The friendly exchange between Musk, Pichai, and Altman might have provided a rare glimpse of détente, but the subtext is unmistakable. Google’s benchmark resurgence and Musk’s Grok 4.20 tease indicate that the race for AI supremacy is heating up and far from over.