Davos 2026: Google’s having a moment but AI landscape is ‘white hot,’ says Andrew Ng

AI pioneer Andrew Ng with Moneycontrol's Chandra R Srikanth at World Economic Forum in Davos

• Google's Gemini 3 model drives strong momentum in the AI landscape
• Google Gemini, OpenAI's ChatGPT lead horizontal information discovery, says Ng
• Ng sees room for AI innovation in verticals like travel, retail, and coding

Did our AI summary help?

Google's having a moment on the back of the powerful Gemini 3 model, artificial intelligence (AI) pioneer Andrew Ng told Moneycontrol in an interview at the World Economic Forum (WEF) 2026 in Davos.

Ng started and led the Google Brain team until December 2012. The research unit was later merged with DeepMind to create Google DeepMind, a unified AI research lab that serves as the "engine room" for all of Google and the broader Alphabet.

"Gemini 3 is a very strong model, but I think the entire AI landscape is white hot and this creates a lot of opportunities for the Anthropics, the OpenAIs, and many others of the world to play a big role in it," Ng, the founder of DeepLearning.AI, managing general partner at AI Fund and co-founder of Coursera, told Moneycontrol.

"Having built the Google Brain team and led that in the early days, I know Google has an amazing team as one of many companies with amazing teams," he added. "Larry (Page) and Sergey (Brin) have continued to be tremendous forces at Google. I'm glad to see them doing so well."

Also read: How Google reclaimed the AI crown

Over the past year, Google has mounted a strong comeback in the AI race with powerful frontier models topping major AI benchmarks, impressive products such as NotebookLM, Google Beam, and Flow, and features like Nano Banana image generation that are attracting attention.

Google has also surpassed its Big Tech peers Apple and Microsoft in market cap, which briefly crossed the $4 trillion mark earlier this month.

Ng said Google's Gemini and OpenAI's ChatGPT are the two market leaders in horizontal information discovery.

"ChatGPT is an incredibly strong consumer brand, making it relatively defensible and difficult for new entrants to attack. Google, with its distribution channels, is also strongly in the mix, which accounts for why Gemini is having such strong momentum," he noted.

However, there is still significant room for innovation across vertical markets, including travel, retail, coding, and many other business-specific domains that have yet to be fully built out, Ng added.