Salesforce CEO declares Google's Gemini 3 has 'Leapt' past ChatGPT

The most consequential battle in modern computing has shifted gear; with the launch of Google's Gemini 3 Pro and OpenAI's GPT-5.1, the focus is now on autonomous action rather than conversational fluency.

And now a viral, high-stakes endorsement from Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce has intensified the rivalry, suggesting the crown of AI supremacy is now up for grabs.

Holy shit. I’ve used ChatGPT every day for 3 years. Just spent 2 hours on Gemini 3. I’m not going back. The leap is insane — reasoning, speed, images, video… everything is sharper and faster. It feels like the world just changed, again. ❤️ 🤖 https://t.co/HruXhc16Mq

— Marc Benioff (@Benioff) November 23, 2025

The Spark: A CEO's Declaration

The AI world, long accustomed to predictable leapfrogging between titans, was momentarily stunned by a single social media post. Salesforce CEO, Marc Benioff publicly declared that Google's newly released Gemini 3 Pro had finally ended his relationship with ChatGPT. "I'm not going back," Benioff wrote, praising the "insane" leap in reasoning, speed, and multimodal capabilities shown by the new model.

Benioff's endorsement is being decoded as much more than casual user feedback; maybe a signal to the enterprise market. The statement validated Google's strategy to reclaim its lead against Microsoft-backed OpenAI. The message came through, the technology is no longer marginally better, but a generational shift that every business leader must heed. This viral decree instantly turned a quiet, technical competition into a high-stakes public spectacle.

The New Battlefield: Agentic AI

The core driver for this new wave of competition is the shift from Generative AI to Agentic AI.

Generative AI models were largely reactive, earlier versions of ChatGPT and Gemini waited for a human prompt and responded with creative content in one self-contained output. They were great tools but remained passive.

Agentic AI, on the other hand, is proactive and autonomous. The new models have been engineered to:

1. Decompose complex, long-horizon goals into executable sub-tasks.

2. Use external systems for information and action execution: APIs, email, browsers.

3. Have persistent objectives and correct their mistakes independently, without constant human intervention.

The debate, therefore, is not really about which model can write a better sonnet but about which model can, on its own, analyse market data and draft a financial report and schedule a follow-on meeting across three different time zones. In summary, AI today is evolving from a glorified tool to a functional digital team member.

The Technological Divide

Head-to-head comparison reveals a nuanced battleground where neither competitor delivers a complete knockout:

Google's Gemini 3 Pro: The Reasoning and Multimodal Powerhouse Gemini 3 has already established a clear lead in many important raw intelligence benchmarks, including logical reasoning and complex problem-solving. Its greatest strength lies in its native multimodality. It processes text, code, images, and video frames in the same architecture; this results in industry-best real-time interpretation-what it calls "Gemini Live"-and video analysis.

Further, because of its deep integration into the Google ecosystem Search, Workspace, and Android-it is uniquely positioned to provide an unparalleled distribution advantage that makes agentic workflows immediately practical for billions of users.

OpenAI GPT-5.1: The Adaptive Coder and Conversationalist. Though OpenAI's latest release fights to catch up on raw benchmarks, it holds strong in key areas. GPT-5.1 does exceptionally well in software engineering, particularly complex debugging and creating consistent, practical code. The model introduces a clever feature called adaptive thinking, where the model scales its effort dynamically based on prompt complexity, balancing response speed for simple queries with deep reasoning for hard ones.

This leads to a faster, more reliable, and arguably more polished conversational user experience that developers and casual users have come to expect from the platform.

Market Implications and Future Stakes

The competitive pressure is extreme. It is speculated that internal alarm bells ring loudly at OpenAI because of the speed and capability of Google's resurgence. The market for enterprise AI solutions will be highly sticky; whoever wins the initial integration contract-for agentic AI-will likely lock that customer in for years.

The real stakes are nothing less than defining the operating system of the future. Will users interact with an AI that orchestrates tasks through an open platform, or one that is seamlessly integrated into a single, unified ecosystem?

The AI Crown War is only just beginning, and its outcome will reshape every industry on the planet.