Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis tells the ‘real secret’ behind Gemini 3.0 performance

Google CEO Sundar Pichai called it the company’s most intelligent model. Demis Hassabis, Google DeepMind chief executive, said it is ‘another big step on the path toward AGI” and “the best model in the world for multimodal understanding and our most powerful agentic and vibe coding model yet”. Google Gemini 3.0 has received widespread industry acclaim, and the model's capabilities have drawn attention even from Google’s primary competitor – OpenAI CEO. Hassabis has now revealed the key factor driving the model’s performance.

Oriol Vinyals, VP of research and deep learning lead and Google DeepMind, explained in a post that the secret behind Gemini 3 is “Improving pre-training & post-training”. The Gemini co-lead also acknowledged that there's lots of room for algorithmic progress and improvement.



Replying to his post, Hassbis said:

Actually if you want to know what the real ‘secret’ is �� it’s world-class research AND world-class engineering AND world-class infra all working closely together with relentless focus and intensity…

“AND world-class leadership & strategy,” Vinyals replied.

According to Pichai, Gemini 3 is “the best model in the world for multimodal understanding, and our most powerful agentic + vibe coding model yet. Gemini 3 can bring any idea to life, quickly grasping context and intent so you can get what you need with less prompting.”

The company says that the model “tops the LMArena Leaderboard with a breakthrough score of 1501 Elo. It demonstrates PhD-level reasoning with top scores on Humanity’s Last Exam (37.5% without the usage of any tools) and GPQA Diamond (91.9%). It also sets a new standard for frontier models in mathematics, achieving a new state-of-the-art of 23.4% on MathArena Apex.”

Sam Altman’s internal memo to employees

Sam Altman, CEO of ChatGPT maker OpenAI, publicly acknowledged the technological strides made by rival Google, even warning colleagues in an internal memo that the competitor's success could create "temporary economic headwinds" for OpenAI. Altman’s memo, written prior to Google’s high-profile release of its Gemini 3 AI model, expressed optimism that OpenAI is "catching up fast" and will ultimately emerge as the leader in the competitive AI race.

Google's Gemini 3, which the tech giant has described as its most capable model to date, has since garnered praise from software developers for its strong performance in complex tasks. These capabilities include automating website and product design, and writing code—lucrative revenue streams fiercely contested by OpenAI and other competitors like Anthropic.