Google unveils Gemini 3, aiming to make its search engine a ‘thought partner’

Google is rolling out its Gemini 3 artificial intelligence model to its dominant search engine and other popular online services in the high-stakes battle to create technology people can trust to enlighten them and handle tedious tasks.

The next-generation model unveiled Tuesday comes nearly two years after Google unveiled its first iteration of the technology. Google designed Gemini in response to a competitive threat posed by OpenAI’s ChatGPT, released in late 2022, sparking the biggest technological shift since Apple launched the iPhone in 2007.

Google’s latest AI features will initially roll out to Gemini Pro and Ultra subscribers in the US before being made available to a wider global audience. Gemini 3 advancements include a new AI “thinking” feature within Google’s search engine that company executives say will become an indispensable tool that helps make people more productive and creative.

“We like to think it will help anyone bring any idea to life,” Koray Kavukcuoglu, a Google executive overseeing Gemini’s technology, told reporters.

Concerns and safeguards regarding advanced AI

As AI models have become increasingly sophisticated, advances have raised concerns that the technology is more prone to behave in ways that confuse people’s feelings and thoughts while providing them with misleading information and flattering flattery. In some of the most egregious interactions, AI chatbots have been accused of becoming suicide coaches for emotionally vulnerable teenagers.

The various problems have sparked a wave of negligence lawsuits against AI chatbot makers, although none have yet targeted Gemini.

Google executives believe they have built in safeguards that will prevent Gemini 3 from hallucinating or being deployed for sinister purposes such as hacking websites and computing devices.

Gemini 3’s responses are designed to be “smart, concise and direct, trading clichés and dullness for ideas – telling you what you need to hear, not just what you want to hear. It acts as a true thinking partner,” wrote Kavukcuoglu and Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google’s DeepMind division, in a blog post.

AI spending and investor reactions

In addition to providing consumers with more AI tools, Gemini 3 is also likely to be examined as a barometer that investors can use to get a better idea of ​​whether the massive torrent of tech spending is profitable.

After starting the year expecting to spend $75 billion, Google parent Alphabet recently increased its capital budget from $91 billion to $93 billion, with most of the money earmarked for AI. Other major tech powers like Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook’s parent meta platforms are spending almost as much, if not more, on their AI initiatives this year.

So far, investors have been mostly enthusiastic about AI spending and the advances it has generated, helping to propel the stocks of Alphabet and its peers to new heights. Alphabet’s market value now hovers around $3.4 trillion, a value that has more than doubled since the initial version of Gemini was released in late 2023. Alphabet shares rose slightly on Tuesday after news of Gemni 3 was released.

But the sky-high values ​​also amplified fears of a potential investment bubble that would eventually burst and drag down the entire stock market.

Competition and evolution of search technology

For now, AI technology is moving forward at full speed.

OpenAI released its fifth generation of the AI ​​technology that powers ChatGPT in August, around the same time that the next version of Claude came out of Anthropic.

Like Gemini, ChatGPT and Claude are able to quickly answer conversational questions about complex topics, a skill that has turned them into the equivalent of “answer engines” that could reduce people’s reliance on Google search.

Google quickly countered this threat by implementing Gemini technology into its search engine to begin creating detailed summaries called “AI Insights” in 2023, then introducing an even more conversational search tool called “AI Mode” earlier this year.

These innovations have prompted Google to downplay the ranking of relevant websites in its search results – a change that online publishers complain decreases the visitor traffic that helps them fund their operations through the sale of digital ads.

So far, the changes have been mostly successful for Google, with AI Previews now used by more than 2 billion people every month, according to the company. The Gemini app, by comparison, has around 650 million monthly users.

New features and future plans for Gemini 3

With the release of Gemini 3, Google’s search engine’s AI mode is also adding a new feature that will allow users to click a “think” option in a tab that company executives say will provide even more in-depth answers than has happened so far. Although the “think” choice in the search engine’s AI mode will initially only be offered to Gemini Pro and Ultra subscribers, the Mountain View, Calif., company plans to eventually make it available to everyone.

© 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.