Google's Gemini AI assistant reaches one billion users

Business Recorder reported that Google's Gemini assistant has crossed one billion monthly users, a milestone CEO Sundar Pichai announced on Tuesday. In a social media post, Pichai called Gemini the company's fastest-growing product and the 14th Google offering to reach a billion users. The count covers people using the Gemini app across Google's wider ecosystem, and the announcement came a week after a major reshuffle of the company's AI division.

Leadership changes are also under way at Google DeepMind, the lab that builds the Gemini models. Demis Hassabis, a Nobel laureate in chemistry, has stepped back from day-to-day management, and several researchers, including Jeff Dean, have left. Dean was a central engineering figure for nearly three decades. Its new flagship model, Gemini 3.5 Pro, was first promised for June but has not been released, while rivals have launched models seen as more capable at writing computer code, the sector's most lucrative area.

OpenAI, which kicked off the current AI boom with its free ChatGPT app in November 2022, said in July that its products had reached one billion users. It did not specify whether that figure referred to monthly or weekly users. Sensor Tower, which estimates usage from company data, found that ChatGPT's share of AI assistant usage fell below 50 percent in the first half, a sign of tightening competition from Gemini, DeepSeek and Anthropic's Claude.