Google CEO Sundar Pichai has announced that the company’s artificial intelligence system, Gemini, has reached one billion monthly active users. While 13 other Google products have previously hit this milestone, Gemini reached it faster than any of them. It should be noted that this statistic only includes people who personally visit the Gemini app or web interface to submit queries or use Gemini Live.
User behavior reveals interesting trends. According to company data, 63 percent of active users prefer using voice prompts, and 20 percent of Gemini Live users also share their camera feed or screen with the bot. Demand is also high among students; 38 percent of queries related to school assignments include attached files, which has prompted Google to develop new educational tools. Image generation is also highly active, with 150 million images created daily, all of which are watermarked with SynthID.
This success is partly due to Gemini being pre-installed on almost all Android smartphones worldwide. However, the figures are also impressive on the iOS platform, where the app has been downloaded by more than 100 million people. Despite these numbers, the company is spending heavily on infrastructure, resulting in negative cash flow for the first time.
Recently, however, the pace of Google’s AI development has slowed down. A number of leading experts have left the company, and DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis has stepped down from his leadership role. The scheduled release of Gemini 3.5 Pro, expected in June, did not take place, and it is now unclear whether it will be released at all. Critics point out that in terms of coding quality, Gemini still lags behind competitors OpenAI and Anthropic.
The numbers show that Google’s vast audience provides a solid foundation, but it can be misleading. Market dominance often allows the company to mask technological shortcomings that become apparent when compared directly with rivals OpenAI and Anthropic.
It is evident that internal personnel changes and strategic uncertainty are directly impacting the release of new models. If Google cannot bridge the productivity gap in the coming months, even the most widely used application will not be able to maintain high user loyalty.
