Watch out, ChatGPT! Google's Gemini is catching up. (www.businessinsider.com)

Google announced its Gemini app now has 650 million monthly active users, up from 450 million in July, a surge Google attributes in part to the viral rollout of its Nano Banana image tool. That growth narrows the gap with OpenAI — which reports about 800 million weekly ChatGPT users — and signals strong consumer appetite for Gemini’s multimodal features (text + images). While the headline numbers are impressive, the metrics aren’t perfectly comparable (monthly vs. weekly active users), but the trajectory makes clear Gemini is gaining mainstream traction. Beyond product adoption, the update comes alongside Alphabet’s first-ever $100 billion quarter ($102.35B revenue) and solid Cloud performance, prompting Google to raise planned 2025 capital expenditures to $91–93 billion (from $85B). For the AI/ML community this matters: rising user demand for multimodal assistants increases pressure for compute, storage, and specialized accelerators, driving bigger cloud contracts and infrastructure buildouts. The boost in capex and Cloud momentum suggests Google is doubling down on scaling models and services, intensifying competition with OpenAI on both consumer reach and the backend hardware/software stack that powers large AI models.