Google’s Gemini app has passed 1 billion users in record time, catching up with rival AI assistant ChatGPT.
Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, said the milestone made Gemini the company’s “fastest growing product ever”.
It becomes the US tech giant’s 14th product to pass 1 billion users, joining others like Chrome, Gmail, Google Maps and YouTube.
OpenAI recently announced that ChatGPT is now used by more than 1 billion people globally, becoming the fastest app ever to reach that figure.
Having launched four months after ChatGPT, initially under the Bard brand, Gemini became a standalone app in 2024, meaning it overtakes ChatGPT as the quickest AI app to reach 1 billion users.
In a blog post detailing the app’s growth, Google revealed that most users are using Gemini in voice mode, while people are also increasingly using live camera feeds and screen sharing for real-time problem solving.
Gemini is used to generate over 150 million images per day and is increasingly being integrated into other apps to serve as an AI assistant.
Google has faced criticism for using its internet search dominance to gain an advantage over competitors in the AI race.
Figures shared by cyber security firm Cloudflare showed that Google’s AI crawlers, which it uses to train the Gemini model, have the same access as the crawlers used for its search engine.
This allows Google to access more than 300 per cent more of the web than OpenAI, and more than 400 per cent more than Anthropic and Meta.
“If you believe that whoever has access to the most data will win, then Google will always have an advantage in the market, which no one will be able to overcome,” Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince told The Independent last year.
“There is a massive structural advantage to being Google, and if you want to ask, ‘why did Gemini just leapfrog OpenAI and everybody else in the space’, it’s not because of the chips, it's not because of the researchers, it's not because they're smarter. It's because Google has access to more data, and it's giving an unfair advantage. And Google only has access to that data because it is leveraging its monopoly in search.”
