Google dominated last week. The launch of its Gemini 3 model marks a giant, undeniable leap in artificial intelligence, perhaps as significant as the public release of ChatGPT in early 2023. The core achievement of Gemini 3 is multimodal reasoning: the model understands text, video, and code all at once.
The accolades are entirely deserved; Google is now clearly leading the technical race. Yet, in the dizzying wake of this success, investors are committing a classic and costly mistake: assuming that a secular trend is a “winner takes all” endgame.
This zero-sum panic is treating Google’s technical lead as unassailable, mistaking a temporary lead for the final outcome. Companies aligned with OpenAI, the parent company of ChatGPT, are being left for dead, their stock treated like debris in the wake of Google’s passing ship. Many bears who completely missed the AI trade beginning in 2023 now publicly doubt that the massive buildout of data centers will ever be completed. They were wrong then, and they are wrong now.
The market is reacting to the foam on the wave.
For sharp investors, the current weakness for shares within the OpenAI ecosystem is not a correction, it is a massive new buying opportunity.
We were among the first in 2023 to argue that ChatGPT’s early lead in chatbots was vulnerable. And we thought it was ridiculous that investors concluded that Google Search’s “ten blue links” strategy was dead in the water. Google is an amazing company filled with the world’s most talented engineers. However, we now believe investors are prematurely planning the funeral of ChatGPT.
The fallout from this panic has been catastrophic for OpenAI’s ecosystem of partners. Microsoft, Oracle, Arm Holdings, Advanced Micro Devices, and to a lesser extent, Nvidia shares are getting pounded as low-information investors assert that OpenAI faces an existential threat. This conclusion ignores the bedrock of reality.
Let’s set aside the obvious: OpenAI has 800 million weekly users and has become the most valuable start-up in history. ChatGPT today is what Google was in 1994. Investment bankers across the board are clamoring for the opportunity to raise capital and bring shares to the public market. Fair or not, this hype cycle is in the early stages.
Then, there is the infrastructure: OpenAI executives have cleared legal hurdles for a public share offering that will give Microsoft a 27% stake. Oracle’s $65 billion backlog isn’t based on market sentiment; it’s based on signed contracts for structural infrastructure growth, the concrete poured for the future of AI. Arm, AMD, and Nvidia are not passengers on the ChatGPT vessel; they are the shipbuilders, whose business interests span the entire AI ocean, regardless of which model dominates the headlines.
AI is a secular trend, not a one-model contest. Generations of legacy computing platforms are being replaced with constantly evolving, high-performance AI networks. Rather than one dominant monopoly, history and AI’s complexity suggest many profitable players will emerge, each with unique strengths. Platform revolutions never produce only one winner.
Even Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, agrees. He told Bloomberg earlier in November that AI leadership will be spread across hardware, software, and distribution channels. Google’s bespoke AI processors called TPUs, Gemini, and YouTube and Android are great, but ultimate victory is far from assured. The market’s current narrow focus is its biggest blind spot.
This market turbulence is an overreaction to a single news cycle. We reiterate: AI is a multi-decade secular trend, not a one-model monopoly. The fear driving this sell-off is as irrational as the original ChatGPT euphoria. This is not a funeral, it is the price of admission. Buy the ecosystem now.