Business Insider’s amazing Google reporter Hugh Langley has been playing (er… working) with Google’s new Gemini 3 AI service this week.
This is the latest big AI model release, competing with OpenAI‘s GPT-5, xAI‘s Grok 4, and the latest offerings from Anthropic.
Gemini 3 is getting good reviews so far. So good that Google shares hit a record on Wednesday, putting the company’s market value very close to Microsoft.
Here are Hugh’s initial thoughts, after trying Gemini 3 out for a day or so:
“I think where Gemini 3 is most impressive—and where it’s already grabbing attention—is its ability to create new things from whole cloth, thanks to improved multimodal and coding capabilities.”
Gemini 3 is particularly good at designing interactive simulations. That could be interesting for visual learning, building websites and apps, or just having fun, Hugh told me.
He played with this new model in a Google sandbox called AI Studio. It’s like a real sandbox, but for developers. And it’s digital, giving access to Google’s AI offerings via the internet. There’s no real sand.
Hugh started with something basic: an interactive website about elephants.
“I asked Gemini to include lots of fun widgets and trivia about the animal, but little else. I wanted to see how much Gemini would fill in the gaps.”
While the overall website design was a little sparse, it delivered. Hugh liked this little widget that generated a fun elephant fact every time he pressed a button.
“It also included a mini game where I had to feed the elephant by giving it peanuts,” Hugh said. “Once I filled the bar, a pop-up message informed me the elephant was now happy, so that’s nice.”
Being able to visualize complex ideas is an area where AI could be particularly useful. Hugh asked Gemini 3 to create an interactive website to explain photosynthesis.
“Gemini generated some sliders to adjust the levels of sunlight, water and carbon dioxide that were floating around as different colored particles,” he said. “If I got the balance correct, it told me I had successfully created energy!”
Hugh hadn’t generated energy. In fact, that Gemini 3 model run probably sucked up quite a bit of power. Still, pretty impressive.
Other Gemini 3 users are creating interesting new things. Hugh liked this idea to have Gemini build a Lego creator, through a simple prompt such as “Create a 3D Lego builder. Let me select different shapes of brick.”
Here’s an example. Hugh was able to replicate his own version.
I asked Gemini 3 Pro to create a 3D LEGO editor.
In one shot it nailed the UI, complex spatial logic, and all the functionality.
We’re entering a new era. pic.twitter.com/Y7OndCB8CK— Pietro Schirano (@skirano) November 18, 2025
Then, there are all the video games that users are getting Gemini 3 to create. Jeff Dean, one of Google’s top AI researchers, posted several clips of these games.
Also, we’re exploring new ways to create games using Gemini 3 – we’ve created and published a few experimental YouTube Playables.
Each of the games shown in the video below was created by Gemini 3 from scratch w/a few natural language prompts/images.
Try them out at… pic.twitter.com/lT59AUXfgT— Jeff Dean (@JeffDean) November 18, 2025
Hugh gave this a shot, too. This required a bit more back-and-forth with Gemini to get right.
He wanted to make “Super Dario Land,” a game where the player has to get Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei into the correct warp pipe. If they succeed, the player is rewarded with AGI (the theoretical moment when machines outperform humans on most tasks).
Hugh asked Gemini to style it like one of Nintendo’s old Game Boy games.
“At first, Dario couldn’t jump high enough, so I asked Gemini to fix that,” Hugh told me. “With one extra prompt, the physics were solved!”
The game was very quickly playable as Gemini did the work of mapping the controls to Hugh’s computer keyboard without any direction from him.
“The game itself might not be a hit, but I’m leaving the door open for a sequel. Dario, call me!” Hugh said.
If anyone wants to play Hugh’s game, send him an email at [email protected]. It’s fun!
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