Google's Gemini 3 Is Here: A Special Early Look
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Casey, we have a special emergency podcast episode today about the launch of Gemini 3. Yes, Kevin, hotly awaited, much discussed among AI nerds here in Silicon Valley. We are finally about to get our hands on the genuine article. Yeah, so normally we wouldn't break our Friday publication schedule to publish a special episode just about our new model coming out from one of the big AI companies. They're releasing models all the time. But there are a couple reasons that we thought it was worth doing this this week to talk about this model, Gemini 3, in particular. The first is that we got some time with Demis Hassabis and Josh Woodward, two of the leading AI executives at Google. Demis, of course, is the CEO of Google DeepMind, which is their in-house AI lab.
And Josh Woodward is the VP of the Gemini team and some other stuff there at Google. So we were excited to talk to them and ask them about this big new model release. But I think there are a couple of other reasons we were interested in doing this as well. Yeah, I mean, one big thing, Kevin, is just that maybe more than other model releases, this one seems to have the attention of Google's competitors. We're hearing a lot of whispers from folks who work at other AI labs that, hmm, it seems like Gemini 3 has managed to figure some things out in a way that may be bad for their businesses. And I think around the AI industry, there's sort of this feeling that Google, which kind of struggled in AI for a couple years there, they had the launch of BARD and the first versions of Gemini, which had some issues.
And I think they were seen as sort of catching up to the state of the art. And now I think the question is, like, is this kind of them taking their crown back? So we'll get into all that with Demis and Josh, but let's just talk, Casey, about what we know about Gemini 3. They held a briefing earlier this week and told us a little bit about the new model and what it can do. So what did we learn about Gemini 3? Yeah, well, so in terms of what it can do, which is always the most interesting to me, Google shared a few different things. One, in addition to saying all the things you would expect, like it's better at coding and it's better at vibe coding. It also is going to do some new things around generating interfaces for you when you ask it a question.
So nowadays, you ask most chatbots a question, it'll spit back an answer in text. Maybe it shows you an image. According to the Google folks, Gemini 3 is just going to start building custom interfaces for you. So they showed an example where somebody wanted to learn about Vincent van Gogh, the painter. And Gemini 3 just sort of like coded up an interactive tutorial that had all sorts of like images and interactive elements. They showed another example that involved building a mortgage calculator for buying a home over a million dollars, which is the lowest amount of money that anyone at Google can imagine spending on a home. So these are the kinds of things that you can expect to find in Gemini 3, Kevin.
Yeah, so I would say the theme of the briefing and of the materials that Google shared ahead of the Gemini 3 launch was this is just kind of better than their last model, Gemini 2.5 Pro, in basically all respects. Some of the benchmarks that caught my attention, one was this benchmark test called Humanity's Last Exam, which is sort of a very hard test. interdisciplinary exam that consists of a bunch of questions, like basically a graduate student or PhD level. And their previous model, Gemini 2.5 Pro, got about a 21.6% on that test, and Gemini 3 Pro gets a 37.5% on that test. That's basically the story of all of these benchmarks.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–5:15
2
Why did Hard Fork publish a special episode about Gemini 3 right now?
5:15–15:36
3
What new capabilities did Google demo for Gemini 3 during the briefing?
15:36–17:17
4
How does Gemini 3 generate custom interfaces and interactive tutorials?
17:17–22:03
5
What benchmark improvements does Gemini 3 show over Gemini 2.5 Pro?
22:03–27:03
6
What practical features (like email management and coding) does Gemini 3 add?
27:03–27:48
Speakers
5 identifiedMore from Hard Fork
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