United Kingdom, Dec. 7 -- The Godfather of AI Geoffrey Hinton thinks Google is "beginning to overtake OpenAI" in the AI race.

Speaking to Business Insider, Hinton said he believes Google is now making major strides on the ChatGPT maker after lagging behind for several years, calling it "more surprising" that the company hadn't already pulled ahead.

His comments follow Google's well-received launch of Gemini 3, an AI upgrade that many in the industry argue outperforms OpenAI's GPT-5 across reasoning and multimodal tasks.

The company has also notched another hit with Nano Banana Pro, its lightweight image model designed for on-device generation.

The momentum has flipped the script from 2022, when Google reportedly declared a "code red" ...