OpenAI CEO Sam Altman reportedly declared a “code red” at the company to improve ChatGPT, delaying advertising plans and other products in the process, The Information reported based on a leaked internal memo. The move follows Google’s release of its Gemini 3 model last month, which has outperformed ChatGPT on some industry benchmark tests and sparked high-profile praise on social media.
Altman wrote, “We are at a critical time for ChatGPT.” The company will push back work on advertising integration, AI agents for health and shopping, and a personal assistant feature called Pulse.
Altman encouraged temporary team transfers and established daily calls for employees responsible for enhancing the chatbot.
The directive creates an odd symmetry with events from December 2022, when Google management declared its own “code red” internal emergency after ChatGPT launched and rapidly gained in popularity. At the time, Google CEO Sundar Pichai reassigned teams across the company to develop AI prototypes and products to compete with OpenAI’s chatbot.
Now, three years later, the AI industry is in a very different place.Google released Gemini 3 in mid-November, and the model quickly topped the LMArena leaderboard, a crowdsourced vibemarking site that allows users to compare two AI models and select the one with outputs that please them most.
The launch has been accompanied by measured praise from some and bombastic hype from others. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff wrote Sunday on X that he was switching to Gemini 3 after using ChatGPT daily for three years.
“I’m not going back,” Benioff wrote. “The leap is insane.”In addition to buzz about Gemini on social media, Google is quickly catching up to ChatGPT in user numbers. ChatGPT has more than 800 million weekly users, according to OpenAI, while Google’s Gemini app has grown from 450 million monthly active users in July to 650 million in October, according to Business Insider.
Not everyone views OpenAI’s “code red” as a genuine alarm. Reuters columnist Robert Cyran wrote on Tuesday that OpenAI’s announcement added “to the impression that OpenAI is trying to do too much at once with technology that still requires a great deal of development and funding.” On the same day Altman’s memo circulated, OpenAI announced an ownership stake in a Thrive Capital venture and a collaboration with Accenture.
“The only thing bigger than the company’s attention deficit is its appetite for capital,” Cyran wrote.In fact, OpenAI faces an unusual competitive disadvantage: Unlike Google, which subsidizes its AI ventures through search advertising revenue, OpenAI does not turn a profit and relies on fundraising to survive.
The company, now valued at around $500 billion, has committed more than $1 trillion in financial obligations to cloud computing providers and chipmakers that supply the computing power needed to train and run its AI models.