Alphabet (GOOG) (GOOGL) shares rose more than 4.5% on Wednesday and hit a new all-time high, amid high praise for the company’s release of its latest large language model, Gemini 3.
Bank of America analyst Justin Post, who has a Buy rating and $335 price target on Alphabet, said the highly anticipated release of the new model did not disappoint. “We think Gemini 3 is another positive step for Google to close any perceived LLM performance gap to Ai competitors,” Post wrote in a note to clients. “Healthy adoption metrics for AI Overviews and Gemini indicate Google is successfully funneling users into its AI surfaces, despite growing competition, and should help ease concerns around potential search disruption.”
Evercore ISI analyst Mark Mahaney called it another example of Google’s leading innovation. “What Google has proven and continues to prove with the release of Gemini 3 is that the company is an innovation engine capable of shipping impressive, high-quality products that lead to additional monetization opportunities,” Mahaney, who has an Outperform rating and $325 price target on Alphabet, wrote in a note to clients.
In announcing the new model, Google made several points of emphasis, including the fact it has stronger contextual understanding and intent recognition. That allows users to get more accurate results in fewer prompts. The tech giant also noted Gemini 3 Pro is capable of solving complex, multi-step problems across domains like science and mathematics with high reliability.
“It’s the best model in the world for multimodal understanding, and our most powerful agentic + vibe coding model yet,” Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai wrote in a post on X, announcing the release.
Pichai reposted a number of comments on X praising Gemini 3, including those from Box (BOX) CEO Aaron Levie and Stripe CEO Patrick Collison. Even Sam Altman, the CEO of Alphabet competitor OpenAI (OPENAI), praised Gemini 3, calling it a “great model.” Pichai replied with the folded hands emoji, which most commonly means “thanks.”
The release of Gemini 3 marks a flurry of updates to large language models in recent days. On Monday, xAI (X.AI) launched Grok 4.1, while OpenAI released ChatGPT-5.1 on November 12.