Google released its Gemini 3 AI model today after weeks of social media hype, vague posting, and wink emojis. An early-morning leak of the Pro version’s model card—which outlines key details about the system and its benchmark performance—had developers posting on X as though Santa had arrived early. Even former OpenAI researcher and cofounder Andrej Karpathy joked about the buildup: “I heard Gemini 3 answers questions before you ask them. And that it can talk to your cat,” he wrote on X.
It remains to be seen, of course, whether the model lives up to the hype that it would, as one X user put it, “absolutely crush” all other state-of-the-art models, including OpenAI’s GPT-5 and Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4.5/Opus 4 and xAI’s Grok 4. But what is clear is that Google’s confident, widespread release of Gemini 3, in Pro and “Deep Think” versions, is a long way from its tentative debut of the first Gemini model in December 2023—after which the company faced intense backlash over “woke” outputs and ahistorical or inaccurate images and text, ultimately admitting it had “missed the mark.” Its Gemini-powered AI Overviews in Search also triggered an online furor after the system famously told users to eat glue and rocks.
