Elon Musk offered public praise to Google CEO Sundar Pichai following the launch of Gemini 3, but quickly pivoted to hint at his own AI countermove. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also joined the chorus of congratulations, posting “Congrats to Google on Gemini 3!
The xAI chief responded “Congrats” to Pichai’s enthusiastic “Geminiii” announcement on X, and multiple “Nice Work” messages to Demis Hassabis, the chief of DeepMind, and others. Looks like a great model.”
In a reply to another post from LMArena, which showed Gemini 3 Pro topping the benchmarks that xAI’s Grok 4.1 Thinking had held briefly, he added: “Congrats indeed! I guess we will have to release 4.20 soon. Gemini 3 is now available across Google Search, the Gemini app with 650 million monthly users, and various developer tools including AI Studio and Vertex AI, marking Google’s fastest-ever rollout of a flagship AI model.
Musk’s praise, however, came with a competitive edge. This marks the first time Google has integrated a new model directly into its search engine on launch day—a departure from previous releases that took weeks or months to deploy.