Yao Shunyu Recaps Gemini's Comeback: "OpenAI Saved Google's Life," Pre-training Has Entered Google's Comfort Zone

According to Dynamic Beating monitoring, former Anthropic research scientist and current Google DeepMind research scientist Yao Shunyu also reviewed the key turning point of Gemini surpassing GPT in the podcast "Language is the World." He believes that Gemini's ability to establish itself in the market relies on the combination of two factors: first, the popular image generation product Nano Banana brought a large number of app downloads, followed by the release of Gemini 3, which retained this user base. Third-party data largely confirmed this assessment, with Gemini's app market share rising to about 25% in early 2026, while ChatGPT dropped from 69% to 45%.

Yao Shunyu also believes that in a sense, OpenAI saved Google. His logic is that there was once a great concern that chatbots would completely replace search, but OpenAI did this first without achieving the ultimate success, not dominating search, and instead gave Google time to catch up. After Google caught up with chatbots on its own, the tables turned uncomfortably for OpenAI.

There have been significant changes within Google's internal research organization as well. Yao Shunyu stated that pre-training has now entered Google's comfort zone, becoming a clearly defined and highly top-down engineering project where Google's strong engineering management capabilities are well suited. Post-training, due to higher uncertainty, still maintains a bottom-up exploratory mode. When asked why Gemini 3 excels in long-text capabilities, he only mentioned that there was a surprising technique during the pre-training phase, and then smilingly refused to disclose further details.