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Davos 2026: Gemini 3 boosts Google’s AI momentum, but race remains wide open, says Andrew Ng
AI pioneer says competition remains wide open across consumer and enterprise markets.
Google is seeing fresh momentum in artificial intelligence following the rollout of its Gemini 3 model, but the global AI race remains intensely competitive, AI researcher Andrew Ng said in an interview with Moneycontrol on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum (WEF) 2026 in Davos.
Ng, who founded and led Google’s Brain team before it was merged with DeepMind to form Google DeepMind, said Gemini 3 is a strong model but cautioned against viewing recent developments as signalling dominance by any single company.
“Gemini 3 is a very strong model, but the entire AI landscape is white hot,” Ng said, adding that the pace of innovation continues to create room for players such as OpenAI, Anthropic and others.
Over the past year, Google has mounted a comeback in the AI race with frontier models that have topped key benchmarks and a slate of new AI-driven products, including NotebookLM, Google Beam and Flow. The company has also drawn attention for features such as its latest image-generation tools.
Ng said Google’s scale and distribution give it an advantage in horizontal AI applications focused on information discovery. He identified Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT as the two leading platforms in this space, pointing to ChatGPT’s strong consumer brand and Google’s vast reach as key factors behind their momentum.
“ChatGPT is an incredibly strong consumer brand, making it relatively difficult for new entrants to attack,” Ng said, adding that Google’s distribution channels keep it firmly in contention.
However, Ng stressed that significant opportunity remains in vertical AI applications that are yet to be fully developed. He highlighted sectors such as travel, retail, coding and other business-specific domains as areas where innovation is still unfolding.
Google’s renewed push in AI has coincided with gains in market capitalisation, with the company recently overtaking Apple and Microsoft to briefly cross the $4 trillion valuation mark earlier this month.
Despite this, Ng said the current phase of AI development is defined by rapid experimentation rather than consolidation, with multiple companies pushing the boundaries of models, products and use cases.
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