Google has announced the launch of Gemini 3, its most intelligent and capable AI model yet. Designed to bring state-of-the-art reasoning and powerful new agentic capabilities, Gemini 3 is set to transform the Google products people use every day, marking a significant leap forward in making AI truly helpful for everyone in South Africa and across the continent.
Kabelo Makwane, Country Director for Google South Africa, commented: “For South Africa, the launch of Gemini 3 is more than a technological breakthrough – it is about democratising access to the most advanced intelligence and ensuring it translates directly into economic opportunity and job creation. This powerful new era of agentic AI is here, and it needs to work for us, helping our businesses thrive and empowering our people to acquire future-proof skills.” This focus on localised impact is strongly supported by recent Google Search trends, which reveal that South African interest in career-focused AI learning has surged, with searches for “AI jobs” and “AI course” both having nearly doubled (+80%) in the past year, signaling a strong local appetite for tools that drive tangible professional and societal progress.
A new era of intelligence begins with the Gemini 3 model itself, which is built to grasp depth and nuance like never before. Gemini 3 Pro, the first model in the new family, demonstrates PhD-level reasoning and sets new performance records on major AI benchmarks, from complex problem-solving (91.9% on GPQA Diamond) to understanding video, images, and even handwritten text. This leap in core intelligence is the foundation for the new experiences rolling out today.
Beyond benchmarks, Gemini 3 Pro brings a new quality to every interaction. Its responses are designed to be smart and direct, trading cliché for genuine insight to act as a true thought partner. It excels at “vibe coding,” allowing developers to bring an idea to life with natural language, and its powerful agentic capabilities mean it can better understand intent, plan multi-step tasks, and get things done with less prompting from the user.
This leap in intelligence enables smarter, more interactive experiences in Google Search, transforming the product from an information tool into an interactive learning companion. For the first time, a new Gemini model is available in Search from day one. In AI Mode, Gemini 3 dynamically creates the ideal visual layout for a query, generating interactive tools and simulations on the fly. Instead of just reading about physics, a user can now interact with a simulation of the three-body problem. Someone researching a mortgage can receive a custom-built loan calculator to compare options in real-time.
The evolution continues with a powerful new agent in the Gemini app, which becomes a personal assistant that can take action on your behalf. For Google AI Ultra subscribers, the new experimental Gemini Agent can orchestrate and complete complex, multi-step tasks across connected Google apps. A user can ask it to “organise my inbox,” and it will prioritise to-dos and draft replies. A request like, “Help me book a mid-size SUV for my trip,” allows the agent to find flight details from an email, compare rental options, and prepare the booking—all while keeping the user in control.
To empower creators to build these kinds of advanced experiences, Google is also launching Google Antigravity, a new agentic development platform. This platform transforms AI from a simple coding assistant into an active partner that can autonomously plan and execute complex software tasks, from building features to fixing bugs, giving developers a powerful new way to bring their own ideas to life.
Google Antigravity is built on core tenets of trust, autonomy, and feedback. It is designed as a “mission control” for orchestrating multiple agents, providing developers with task-level context and verifiable artifacts to ensure they can trust the work being done. This new agent-first approach represents a fundamental shift in how software will be built, allowing developers to operate at a higher, more strategic level.
Gemini 3 has undergone Google’s most comprehensive safety evaluations to date. Gemini 3 Pro is available to everyone starting today in the Gemini app and can be accessed by Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers in AI Mode in Search.
