Google’s Gemini, despite a rocky start, appears to be gaining its footing, with the most recent model beating GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 in the LMSYS Chatbot Arena leaderboard.

The Chatbot Arena is an open platform designed to provide comparisons of the top chatbots’ capabilities to see which one is more advanced at any given point. OpenAI’s GPT models and Anthropic’s Claude have dominated the Chatbot Arena, at least until now.

According to an X post by LMSYS, Google’s 1.5 Pro has now surpassed both and holds the top spot on the leader board.

The news is a big win for Google, especially given the challenges and internal turmoil the company experienced developing Gemini, then known as Bard. Early feedback on Bard from Google employees called the chatbot “cringe-worthy,” and said its responses could lead to “serious injury or death.”

Google CEO Sundar Pichai was criticized for leading the company’s flawed Bard/Gemini rollout, with the issues a contributing factor in some critics calling for his removal as CEO.

Google has clearly made significant headway since those early issues, and are now reaping the reward as Gemini is suddenly the AI model to beat.