Marc Benioff, the billionaire tech CEO of Salesforce.com, recently announced his intention to abandon OpenAI's ChatGPT after briefly testing Google's newly launched Gemini 3 chatbot. Benioff, who had been using ChatGPT daily for nearly three years, shared his excitement in a social media post: "Wow. For three years, I've used ChatGPT every day. Just spent two hours with Gemini 3. I can't go back. The leap is astonishing—reasoning, speed, images, videos… everything is clearer and faster. It feels like the world has changed again."

With 1.1 million followers on platform X, Benioff's post garnered over 3.2 million views by Tuesday morning. His endorsement is particularly notable given his influential status—Forbes estimates his net worth at approximately $8.5 billion—and Salesforce.com's extensive AI partnerships. Just last month, Salesforce expanded its strategic collaboration with OpenAI, integrating ChatGPT into its Agentforce 360 platform and enabling businesses to use OpenAI's GPT-5 model within Salesforce products. At the time, Benioff praised the partnership, stating, "As consumers, we’ve already benefited from ChatGPT’s instant recommendations or insights. Now, businesses can offer the same intelligence and immediacy."

Benioff's swift shift from ChatGPT to Google's Gemini underscores how rapidly the AI landscape is evolving, with models surpassing one another in capabilities within weeks. Google and its DeepMind unit unveiled Gemini 3 last week, touting it as their "most intelligent model yet, combining all of Gemini’s capabilities to bring any idea to life." The model quickly topped the LMArena leaderboard, a crowdsourced benchmark evaluating AI systems on reasoning, coding, writing, and factual accuracy.

Gemini 3's release has drawn widespread attention from Silicon Valley leaders. Even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman congratulated Google, posting on X: "Congrats to Google on launching Gemini 3! Looks like a fantastic model." Andrej Karpathy, OpenAI co-founder and former Tesla AI head, shared his "positive early impressions," calling it "very reliable for daily use" and "clearly a top-tier LLM." Stripe CEO Patrick Collison also praised Gemini 3 for creating an interactive webpage summarizing "10 breakthroughs in genetics," which he described as "super cool."

Behind the public accolades, however, OpenAI has shown signs of concern. In an internal memo circulated before Gemini 3's launch, Altman urged employees to brace for fierce competition, acknowledging that "by all accounts, Google’s recent work is outstanding." He admitted Google’s advancements might bring "some temporary economic headwinds" but emphasized OpenAI is "catching up fast."