OpenAI and Google are in a competitive arms race to dominate the AI industry. Both companies constantly release new products and AI models to one-up each other. However, OpenAI’s ChatGPT has been the clear leader in driving consumer AI adoption, thanks to its first-mover advantage and capturing the market early on among the masses.
But Google has also made great strides with its Gemini AI chatbot (formerly known as Bard). According to The Information, Gemini’s usage has surged in the past few months. During the Google vs US antitrust trial, Sissie Hsiao — who was leading Gemini at Google until recently — revealed in court that Gemini now sees 35 million daily active users (DAU) and 350 million monthly active users (MAU).
To give you some perspective, back in October last year, Gemini had just 9 million daily active users. So within just six months, Gemini’s usage has surged from 9 million to 35 million DAU, which is nearly a 4x jump.
ChatGPT, on the other hand, is also seeing astronomical growth and widespread adoption, thanks to the recent Ghibli trend. ChatGPT now has 160 million daily active users and 600 million monthly active users. In terms of daily traffic, ChatGPT boasts around 4.5x more users than Gemini, and in terms of monthly traffic, ChatGPT sees about 1.7x more users than Gemini.
Sure, ChatGPT remains dominant, but Google is also pushing hard to make Gemini the default choice among the masses, and a potential alternative to ChatGPT. But what explains Gemini’s recent surge in user adoption? Well, there are a number of factors, so let’s take a look.
Google Reshuffles Gemini AI Leadership
Earlier this month, Semafor reported that Google has reshuffled Gemini’s leadership by replacing Sissie Hsiao with Josh Woodward. Woodward played a key role in launching NotebookLM, the standout product from Google’s stable. Following his appointment to lead Gemini, Google has been more proactive in delivering cutting-edge AI models on Gemini and unlocking new features to free users as well.
For instance, the powerful Gemini 2.5 Pro AI model has been widely praised for its coding prowess and general capabilities. The advanced AI model is now available to free users as well. Next, the Deep Research AI agent is free for all Gemini users. In fact, in my own testing, I found that Gemini’s Deep Research outperforms ChatGPT’s Deep Research AI agent.
In addition, the state-of-the-art video generation model, Veo 2, is now available to Gemini Advanced users, which offers better video quality than OpenAI’s Sora. On top of that, Google has added many new features to Gemini, including AI-generated podcasts, Gemini Live with camera and screen sharing, Canvas, Gems, Personalization, file uploads, and more.
Put simply, Google is now in a much stronger position with its model offerings and feature set, compared to OpenAI. While the ongoing antitrust case may prevent Google from forcing OEMs to preload Gemini as the default AI chatbot, it can’t be denied that Gemini has genuinely improved by a significant margin.
