Google’s launch of Gemini 3 is rewriting the map of artificial intelligence—if a few billionaire fans and billions of dollars in market reaction are any indicator. As much as $250 billion was wiped off Nvidia’s market cap in Tuesday morning trading as markets digested the reality that maybe the search empire is striking back in the race to win the AI space.
Billionaires Marc Benioff and Mark Cuban offered contrasting opinions that put in perspective what a pivotal moment this Thanksgiving could be in the AI race. Benioff, the Salesforce founder and CEO who is close to the center of the evolving AI story, posted on X.com that he’s been using ChatGPT every day for the last three years but he’s “not going back” after trying out Gemini 3. “The leap is insane,” he wrote, adding that “it feels like the world just changed, again.”
Cuban, for his part, warned on the Pioneers of AI podcast that the AI race could end up a lot like the search race in the 1990s. “You’ve got five, six, whatever it is, companies that are trying to create the ultimate foundational model that we all depend on,” he said, likening it to the days before Google emerged, when “you didn’t know if it was going to be a winner-take-all, or a top five.” AI could easily end up the same way, he added, in remarks previously reported by Business Insider. “Now, we know with search engines it’s Google.…it’s effectively a winner-take-all.”
Analysts on Wall Street have been saying that there’s a new leader in the race, and the empire, so to speak, is striking back. This week’s events poses the question: What if the Google of the AI race is, after all the drama of the last three years, Google itself?
Gemini 3: A turning point?
On Nov. 18, Google unveiled Gemini 3—the first AI model built directly into its Search platform—with what it described as breakthrough performance across coding, mathematics, scientific reasoning, and creative writing. As reported by The Verge, Gemini 3 quickly topped rankings on LMArena, a widely followed leaderboard for AI models, with a record-breaking comprehension and context score.
Google highlighted the model’s new Deep Think reasoning mode as a leapfrogging advance over previous Gemini and OpenAI releases, offering the technical community a tool that excels at both multimodal tasks and deeper logic challenges. In testing, Google said that Deep Think outperformed Gemini 3 Pro on Humanity’s Last Exam (41.0% without the use of tools) and GPQA Diamond (93.8%), while notching an unprecedented 45.1% on ARC-AGI-2, which tests for solving novel challenges.
Analysts were effusive about Gemini 3. Investment firm D.A. Davidson characterized Gemini 3 as “current state of the art” and its “favorite model generally available today,” while Bank of America Securities wrote that it was “another positive step” for Google as it worked to close any “perceived LLM performance gap” to rivals including OpenAI. At the same time, OpenAI has been facing a reported decline in engagement, and The Information reported that CEO Sam Altman warned staffers of “temporary economic headwinds” and “rough vibes” amid increasing competition.
Stock movements seem to be telling a story. Nvidia, at the center of a massive web of spending with OpenAI a key player as well, is down nearly 4% since the release of Gemini 3, and down nearly 9% over the last month, while Alphabet is up 11% over the last five days and almost 19% over the last month. Other stocks more closely tied to the OpenAI story have suffered even more, with Advanced Micro Devices down over 13% over five days and over 23% over a month, while Oracle is down over 10% and over 30% over the same respective time periods.
