A lot of the necessary infrastructural work happened last year. In November, Google released Gemini 3,<\/a> which is widely regarded as the best overall large language model on the market. It wins in most (somewhat dubious) benchmark tests<\/a>, and most experts agree it is either at or near the top of the list<\/a> for most tasks. Its reign won\u2019t be forever, of course \u2014 we\u2019re still very much in the \u201cthere\u2019s a new best model every six weeks\u201d phase of AI \u2014 but Google has proven its best work is consistently the industry\u2019s best work.<\/p>\n One important factor for Gemini 3 was the way it was trained: using Google\u2019s own TPUs, a highly specialized chip the company has been building for years<\/a> for exactly this sort of purpose. Google is certainly susceptible to some of the manufacturing problems and RAM price hikes everyone else is, but unlike nearly all of its competitors, it\u2019s not dependent on Nvidia\u2019s supply chain. Google is able to optimize its entire system to make it better, faster, and cheaper. Nobody else has this kind of full-stack control of its AI destiny.<\/p>\n So what do you do when you have the tech in place? Put it in front of people and put it to work. On Monday, Google and Apple announced<\/a> that Gemini will power the next-generation Siri that\u2019s coming later this year. This is a big win for Apple, which is reportedly paying $1 billion a year<\/a> in the hopes of turning Siri into an AI assistant that is actually useful for a change.<\/p>\n Siri immediately becomes one of the most popular ways people will interact with Gemini<\/p>\n For Google, it\u2019s just as important. Apple saying \u201cthis is the best technology available\u201d is obviously a powerful signal to the market, but even more than that, Siri immediately becomes one of the most popular ways people will interact with Gemini. Apple\u2019s Craig Federighi said in 2024<\/a> that Siri processes \u201csomething like 1.5 billion requests every day,\u201d and while we don\u2019t know the exact details of the new deal, presumably some large percentage of those will soon run through Gemini. (Here\u2019s hoping \u201cset a timer,\u201d the only thing Siri continues to do well, doesn\u2019t get a new and more complicated back end.) Compare that to ChatGPT, which Altman said last year gets 2.5 billion prompts per day.<\/a> The Gemini app is growing fast yet still way behind ChatGPT, but adding Siri to the mix will help Google catch up more quickly.<\/p>\n A technology deal is not the same as Gemini fully usurping Siri, of course, and Google would surely like to also have Siri punt questions to Gemini the way it currently does with ChatGPT. But the deal still matters because every user matters: The more user activity and data these companies can collect, the better their models and products can be. The recent search trial was in part about this very flywheel<\/a>, and it holds just as true with AI.<\/p>\n Google\u2019s other announcement this week is an even bigger flex. It announced an opt-in feature called \u201cPersonal Intelligence<\/a>,\u201d which connects Gemini to the vast ocean of information Google has about you in order to give you better responses. Every time you ask it a question, Gemini can now answer it by looking at your recent searches, the videos you watch on YouTube, your emails, your photos, your files, and more. You really can\u2019t overstate how big a deal this is: Google no longer has to ask you to give it lots of context, hope you provide excellent and detailed prompts every time, or build out complicated custom instruction systems. Google already knows a scary amount about you, and now Gemini does, too.<\/p>\n Right now, Personal Intelligence is in beta for a subset of paying AI customers. Eventually, Google plans to bring it to everyone, everywhere. And it plans to bring it to the most important Google product of all, the most popular webpage on the planet: its search engine. AI Mode in Search is for now still just a tab to the side of the general search results, but Google very clearly sees it as the future of Search. And it wants to turn Gemini into a portal to all of Google\u2019s data about you, the internet, and the world.<\/p>\n In 2022, when ChatGPT launched, it was clear that Google had been caught flat-footed. But credit where it\u2019s due: For a company not exactly known for its ability to focus on a coherent product strategy, Google managed to marshal its considerable resources in a single direction. Now, if chatbots are in fact the future \u2014 and most of the AI industry continues to bet that they are \u2014 there is simply no other company currently set up to truly compete with Google. Google has the models. It has the resources to improve them. It now has the distribution necessary to get people to use its bots, and the data required to make them uniquely personal and useful. At least for now, ChatGPT has the brand power, and the daily active users. But Google has almost everything else. 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