Why Google Gemini looks poised to win the AI race over OpenAI

If you want to win in AI — and I mean win in the biggest, most lucrative, most shape-the-world-in-your-image kind of way — you have to do a bunch of hard things simultaneously. You need to have a model that is unquestionably one of the best on the market. You need the nearly infinite resources required to continue to improve that model and deploy it at massive scale. You need at least one AI-based product that lots of people use, and ideally more than one. And you need access to as much of your users’ other data — their personal information, their online activity, even the files on their computer — as you can possibly get.

Each one of these elements is complex and competitive; there’s a reason OpenAI CEO Sam Altman keeps shouting about how he needs trillions of dollars in compute alone. But Google is the one company that appears to have all of the pieces already in order. Over the last year, and even in the last few days, the company has made moves that suggest it is ready to be the biggest and most impactful force in AI.

A lot of the necessary infrastructural work happened last year. In November, Google released Gemini 3, which is widely regarded as the best overall large language model on the market. It wins in most (somewhat dubious) benchmark tests, and most experts agree it is either at or near the top of the list for most tasks. Its reign won’t be forever, of course — we’re still very much in the “there’s a new best model every six weeks” phase of AI — but Google has proven its best work is consistently the industry’s best work.

One important factor for Gemini 3 was the way it was trained: using Google’s own TPUs, a highly specialized chip the company has been building for years for exactly this sort of purpose. Google is certainly susceptible to some of the manufacturing problems and RAM price hikes everyone else is, but unlike nearly all of its competitors, it’s not dependent on Nvidia’s supply chain. Google is able to optimize its entire system to make it better, faster, and cheaper. Nobody else has this kind of full-stack control of its AI destiny.

So what do you do when you have the tech in place? Put it in front of people and put it to work. On Monday, Google and Apple announced that Gemini will power the next-generation Siri that’s coming later this year. This is a big win for Apple, which is reportedly paying $1 billion a year in the hopes of turning Siri into an AI assistant that is actually useful for a change.

For Google, it’s just as important. Apple saying “this is the best technology available” is obviously a powerful signal to the market, but even more than that, Siri immediately becomes one of the most popular ways people will interact with Gemini. Apple’s Craig Federighi said in 2024 that Siri processes “something like 1.5 billion requests every day,” and while we don’t know the exact details of the new deal, presumably some large percentage of those will soon run through Gemini. (Here’s hoping “set a timer,” the only thing Siri continues to do well, doesn’t get a new and more complicated back end.) Compare that to ChatGPT, which Altman said last year gets 2.5 billion prompts per day. The Gemini app is growing fast yet still way behind ChatGPT, but adding Siri to the mix will help Google catch up more quickly.

A technology deal is not the same as Gemini fully usurping Siri, of course, and Google would surely like to also have Siri punt questions to Gemini the way it currently does with ChatGPT. But the deal still matters because every user matters: The more user activity and data these companies can collect, the better their models and products can be. The recent search trial was in part about this very flywheel, and it holds just as true with AI.

Google’s other announcement this week is an even bigger flex. It announced an opt-in feature called “Personal Intelligence,” which connects Gemini to the vast ocean of information Google has about you in order to give you better responses. Every time you ask it a question, Gemini can now answer it by looking at your recent searches, the videos you watch on YouTube, your emails, your photos, your files, and more. You really can’t overstate how big a deal this is: Google no longer has to ask you to give it lots of context, hope you provide excellent and detailed prompts every time, or build out complicated custom instruction systems. Google already knows a scary amount about you, and now Gemini does, too.

Right now, Personal Intelligence is in beta for a subset of paying AI customers. Eventually, Google plans to bring it to everyone, everywhere. And it plans to bring it to the most important Google product of all, the most popular webpage on the planet: its search engine. AI Mode in Search is for now still just a tab to the side of the general search results, but Google very clearly sees it as the future of Search. And it wants to turn Gemini into a portal to all of Google’s data about you, the internet, and the world.

In 2022, when ChatGPT launched, it was clear that Google had been caught flat-footed. But credit where it’s due: For a company not exactly known for its ability to focus on a coherent product strategy, Google managed to marshal its considerable resources in a single direction. Now, if chatbots are in fact the future — and most of the AI industry continues to bet that they are — there is simply no other company currently set up to truly compete with Google. Google has the models. It has the resources to improve them. It now has the distribution necessary to get people to use its bots, and the data required to make them uniquely personal and useful. At least for now, ChatGPT has the brand power, and the daily active users. But Google has almost everything else. Even the iPhone.