Gemini Reversal Retrospective: "OpenAI Saved Google's Life," Pre-training Has Entered Google's Comfort Zone

According to monitoring by Dongcha Beating, 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 was able to establish itself in the market based on the combination of two factors: first, the explosively popular image generation product Nano Banana brought in 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 fell from 69% to 45%.

Yao Shunyu also believes that in a sense, OpenAI saved Google's life. 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 goal, not taking over search entirely, but instead giving Google time to catch up. When Google caught up with chatbots on its own, the uncomfortable situation actually turned against OpenAI.

Internally, Google has also undergone significant changes in its research and development organization. Yao Shunyu said pre-training has now entered Google's comfort zone, becoming a node-clear, highly top-down engineering project, perfectly suited to Google's strong engineering management capabilities. Post-training, due to higher uncertainty, still maintains a bottom-up exploratory mode. When asked why Gemini 3 has strong long-text capabilities, he only mentioned a surprising technique in the pre-training phase and then smiled, refusing to disclose further details.