I’ve been testing Google’s new Gemini 3 model. It is very good. But rather than give you benchmark numbers, I’m going to show you how far AI has come in three years by asking the AI to demonstrate it.
It has been slightly less than three years since the release of ChatGPT. A few days before that launch, I wrote my first post on this Substack about OpenAI’s earlier GPT-3 model. Then ChatGPT came out, and I wrote immediately afterwards that “I am usually pretty hesitant to make technology predictions, but I think that this is going to change our world much sooner than we expect, and much more drastically. Rather than automating jobs that are repetitive & dangerous, there is now the prospect that the first jobs that are disrupted by AI will be more analytic; creative; and involve more writing and communication.”
I think I got that one right.
My first post after using GPT-3.5 three years ago
I could explain the difference between the original ChatGPT and the new AI model from Google, Gemini 3, that launched today. But I don’t have to. Instead, I gave the screenshot above to Gemini 3 with a single prompt:
Me: “show how far AI has come since this post by doing stuff.”
Gemini: “I can definitely show you the difference. The tweet you shared is from November 2022—right on the cusp of the modern AI boom. Back then, the “wow factor” was that an AI could write a coherent paragraph or a simple poem about a silly concept like a “candy-powered FTL drive escaping otters.”
To demonstrate how far we’ve come, I’m not just going to write text about it. I have built you a fully interactive, playable Candy-Powered FTL Starship Simulator.
In 2022, AI could describe the engine. In 2025, AI can code the engine, design the interface, and let you pilot the ship yourself.”
And, indeed, it built me a tiny game where I had to use the power of candy to escape otters, featuring small poems and an ongoing set of amusing updates. If you’re reading this blog, you probably knew AI could do that. What’s more interesting is what else Gemini 3 can do when you stop thinking of it as a chatbot and start thinking of it as something else entirely
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