A new race is accelerating, and the next great battle is AI. The signals are unmistakable: Jeff Bezos is edging back into the CEO arena, the Google founders are showing up at Mountain View more frequently to help steer the ship, and Elon Musk is expanding his AI frontier with a fresh $15 billion raise. From Meta to Oracle, America’s technology titans, and the founders who built them, are doing everything necessary to secure their companies’ future. And in this era, survival means one thing: building the most capable AI company.

For Bezos, the writing must have become clear: Amazon needs reinforcement, and he is returning to the ring. As reported: “Jeff Bezos is stepping back into the spotlight as a chief executive for the first time since leaving Amazon four years ago, taking the helm of a new artificial intelligence venture called Project Prometheus.

“The startup, still largely under wraps, already commands $6.2 billion in funding and has hired about 100 employees, many drawn from OpenAI, DeepMind, and Meta. Bezos will lead it as co-CEO with Vik Bajaj, a physicist and chemist with deep roots in Google X and Verily.”

Google People, take note. If Project Prometheus succeeds, Amazon now has a strategic AI backup plan in case its partnerships with Anthropic or others fall short. The battlefield is shifting, and the founders are returning because the stakes in AI are simply too high to stay on the sidelines.

A major redesign is unfolding in the market: technology companies are evolving into AI Utilities, the same way households depend on electricity, water, and fixed-line telephony. Just as you move into a neighborhood and have limited options for these essential utilities, the world is arriving at a point where a few entities will power the backbone of AI across industries.

Yes, from traditional utilities that deliver electricity, water, and phone services, we are now witnessing the rise of utilities that will power intelligence itself. Among the global contenders, Google’s Alphabet stands prominently.

Warren Buffett has just validated this shift with his signature: his chequebook. As Reuters noted, filings released on Friday show that Berkshire Hathaway acquired 17.85 million Alphabet shares, valued at $4.93 billion based on the previous session’s close. This marks one of the final major portfolio entries under Buffett before Greg Abel takes over in 2026. More striking is that it breaks from Berkshire’s long-standing hesitancy toward high-growth tech companies. Before now, Apple was the only major exception, and Buffett embraced it largely because he saw Apple as a consumer company, not a technology bet.

The market’s reaction was swift. Alphabet was on track to gain roughly $180 billion in market value if the rally held through close, underscoring how powerful Berkshire’s endorsement remains. Alphabet also became one of the top-three trending names on Stocktwits as retail traders piled in.

The backing arrives at a moment when enthusiasm around artificial intelligence has started to cool. Business leaders and analysts have raised concerns about lofty valuations across tech, arguing that share prices have run ahead of earnings and that the timeline for returns on enormous data-center spending is still uncertain. The Roundhill Magnificent 7 ETF, which tracks giants such as Nvidia, Microsoft, and Alphabet, has been mostly flat since September after outperforming the broader market for much of the year.

But Alphabet is different. Companies like Alphabet possess a fortress moat, built not only on technology but also on deep, interlocking partnership nodes. It is difficult, nearly impossible, to replicate the breadth, depth, and integration of Alphabet’s ecosystem in short-term by any competitor.

And that is why even if the broader AI sector enters a bubble, Alphabet will endure. Its tentacles run too wide, too deep, and too strategically across the modern digital economy. Mr. Buffett understands that and has joined the party and Alphabet stock position is hitting new highs because when the Oracle of Omaha anoints, everyone pays attention.

Google has rolled out Gemini 3, its newest artificial intelligence model, in a move that signals how aggressively the company is pushing to keep pace with OpenAI’s rapid advances in generative AI.

Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet, said the upgraded model delivers stronger answers to complex queries and reduces the amount of prompting users need before getting accurate results. The rollout begins with select subscribers and will expand widely in the coming weeks. Gemini 3 is being baked directly into the Gemini app, Google’s AI search features such as AI Mode and AI Overviews, and a range of enterprise-facing tools.

This launch arrives only eight months after Gemini 2.5 and less than a year after Gemini 2.0—an unusually fast development cycle that underlines how quickly the major AI companies are iterating in response to one another. OpenAI introduced GPT-5 in August and updated the model again last week, adding a version the company said feels “warmer” and “more intelligent,” as well as another designed to work faster on simple tasks and stay focused on complex ones.

Pichai wrote that AI has evolved in two years from reading text and images to now understanding complex intent, tone, and context.

“Starting today, we’re shipping Gemini at the scale of Google,” he said, adding that the new model has been engineered to understand nuance at a deeper level and anticipate the meaning behind users’ requests.

Google said its ecosystem continues to expand at a rapid clip. The Gemini app now records 650 million monthly active users, while AI Overviews sees 2 billion monthly users. OpenAI reported in August that ChatGPT has 700 million weekly users, keeping the two companies neck-and-neck in overall reach.

Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, said Gemini 3 will aim for more direct and substantial answers. He added that the system is designed to avoid empty or flattering responses, instead prioritizing insight and clarity—an answer to long-running complaints that many chatbots tend to be overly agreeable.

The tech giants building these systems have been pouring unprecedented sums into the hardware and data-center capacity required to sustain them. Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon each raised their capital expenditure forecasts during their latest earnings calls and together expect to spend more than $380 billion this year.

Google is pairing the new model with an expanded developer ecosystem. It introduced “Google Antigravity,” a platform that lets developers code at a higher task-driven level. The company described Gemini 3 as its strongest model yet for vibe coding, a term referring to tools that let developers generate software through conversational prompts.

The company also showcased “generative interfaces,” a new experience where the model can produce answers that resemble a digital magazine, mixing images, stylized text, and structured layouts. In one demonstration, the model was asked to explain the Van Gogh Gallery with added life context, and the response produced a visually rich, mixed-media overview of each piece.

Paid subscribers will be the first to try these enhanced capabilities within AI Mode. Gemini 3 can analyze a user’s question and build tailored outputs such as interactive tables, grids, or custom tools. Google said the model can assemble a loan calculator on the fly or build simulations that help explain complicated physics problems.

Developers will gain access through the Gemini API, while companies can integrate the system through Vertex AI, Google’s cloud platform for deploying AI models. For corporate users, the company said Gemini 3 can be deployed for employee onboarding, procurement tasks, and industrial operations, including analyzing videos and images from factory floors with higher accuracy.

The unveiling positions Google for another round of head-to-head competition with OpenAI, with both companies racing to dominate consumer apps, enterprise tools, and developer ecosystems. The intensity has been rising throughout the year, and Gemini 3 gives Google another major step as the rivalry widens across search, productivity software, creative tools, and coding environments.

This latest launch signals that the speed of innovation in generative AI is unlikely to slow down soon. Each release from Google or OpenAI is now prompting near-immediate responses from the other, setting up a rivalry that continues to deepen across products, platforms, and user bases.

Intuit has entered one of the most sweeping AI partnerships in the financial-software world, agreeing to pay OpenAI more than $100 million annually to embed the startup’s large language models across its most popular products.

The agreement instantly caught Wall Street’s attention, lifting Intuit shares by 2% in premarket trading.

The deal places OpenAI’s technology at the core of GenOS, Intuit’s internal AI system that fuels TurboTax, QuickBooks, Credit Karma, and Mailchimp. With the new arrangement, Intuit plans to deploy advanced AI agents capable of handling tax guidance, bookkeeping work, personal finance decisions, and marketing tasks. The ambition is to give millions of customers an intelligent assistant woven directly into the services they already use.

A standout element of the partnership is the integration of ChatGPT as a front door to Intuit’s ecosystem. TurboTax users will be able to link their Intuit accounts to ChatGPT, allowing them to carry out tax or financial actions through conversational prompts. ChatGPT will guide them step-by-step based on the information in their profiles, executing tasks without accessing the underlying documents. All interactions occur inside ChatGPT, while the sensitive data remains secured within Intuit’s environment.

Customers will also be able to authorize Intuit to pull specific information and provide tailored outcomes. Someone preparing their taxes can ask ChatGPT to estimate a refund. A business owner can ask for QuickBooks insights tied to real-time transactions. A user browsing credit options can request recommendations curated through Credit Karma. The companies say this setup will save time while preserving the privacy and control customers expect from financial platforms.

For OpenAI, the agreement is a major commercial milestone. The company has been searching for substantial industry partners to bring ChatGPT into sectors where task automation and decision support can generate recurring revenue. Its enormous $500 billion valuation and more than $1.4 trillion in long-term spending commitments have placed pressure on it to show clear paths to revenue expansion. A partner as large and data-intensive as Intuit provides a considerable boost.

The deal also reinforces OpenAI’s broader push to turn ChatGPT into a platform that powers purchases, transactions, and business operations. Recent agreements with PayPal, Shopify, and Walmart have allowed ChatGPT to handle payments, shopping, and commerce-related interactions. The addition of Intuit brings this strategy into a more tightly regulated arena, one where accuracy and security are crucial.

However, privacy sits at the heart of the collaboration. Intuit says all financial and tax information remains inside its own system, even when users engage entirely through ChatGPT. The companies designed the integration so that ChatGPT can issue instructions and receive results without absorbing or storing customers’ confidential documents.

The partnership marks a turning point for the financial software industry, showing how rapidly AI is becoming a foundational element of tax preparation, bookkeeping, and personal finance. Intuit gains a powerful technology upgrade that spans its product suite, while OpenAI secures a robust revenue stream and deepens its reach into another major industry.

Both companies are positioning the deal as a future-shaping step—one that blends convenience with secure automation, and signals that AI-powered financial tools are entering a new phase of mainstream adoption.