Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
In the months after OpenAI announced its blockbuster AI chatbot ChatGPT three years ago, Google CEO Sundar Pichai pulled out the fire alarm.
The search giant’s management issued a “code red” on this, which Pichai saw as an imminent disruption to its core business – a necessary level of caution in retrospect, given ChatGPT’s rapid growth in popularity and influence.
The all-out controversy that followed in the years that followed, as AI companies tried to outdo each other with their offerings as investors threw billions of dollars at the technology, changed the dynamic significantly.
And now, the dice have officially turned: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has declared his own “Code Red” in a memo to employees this week, because wall street journal reportsUrged employees to improve the quality of the company’s blockbuster chatbot, even at the cost of delays in other projects.
This is the clearest sign yet that Altman and OpenAI are feeling a tremendous level of pressure in the face of intense competition, having made significant progress since ChatGPT was released to the public in late 2022.
Google, in particular, took on the challenge with its latest AI model, Gemini 3, Received high scores on benchmarks Compared to ChatGPT last month. The search giant’s monthly active AI users also increased significantly 450 million to 650 million Between July and October. That’s a far cry from ChatGPT’s 800 million or so weekly users as of September.
Looking to once again outpace its competition, OpenAI has committed to spending more than $1 trillion on data center buildouts to support new users and its latest AI models. That’s despite the burning through billions of dollars Every quarter.
However, Google has a huge financial advantage by being already profitable. It can afford to spend aggressively on data centers, at least for some time. Additionally, Google Search has been the de facto search engine on the Internet for decades, giving it access to a large number of existing users who may be influenced by its AI offerings.
Altman claimed in the memo that the company has a breakthrough in the form of an even more powerful reasoning model, which is set to be released early next week. WSJPossibly a direct answer to Google’s Gemini 3.
He is looking to improve the day-to-day experience of ChatGPT as well as make it faster and more reliable. The goal is to put OpenAI’s resources into making its AI chatbot “even more intuitive and personal.” recent tweets By Nick Turley, Head of ChatGPT.
Meanwhile, other projects like advertising or AI shopping agents have reportedly been moved to the back burner.
OpenAI has faced criticism from ChatGPT’s user base following the release of its GPT-5 large language model in August, with complaints of the new model being too closed and not compassionate enough.
In response, OpenAI almost immediately relented and reinstated its hotter 4o model. It also announced a week later that it would make GPT-5 more arcane – indicating it is fearful of losing its most loyal user base. The company’s most recent GPT-5.1 Instant model, released last month, is “warmer and more conversational by default.”
Whether such an approach will be beneficial in the long run and keep OpenAI at the forefront of the AI race is difficult to say – and it is likely to put OpenAI even more clearly in the middle of the debate over the relationship between AI chatbots and mental health. One thing is certain: the pressure is clearly there.
More on OpenAI: OpenAI is suddenly in trouble
