Pressure is mounting on OpenAI. In an internal memo sent on Monday and seen by the Wall Street Journal, Sam Altman calls for a “red alert” to improve ChatGPT. The move would push other projects to the back burner, including advertising development, AI assistants for shopping and health, and Pulse, a personal assistant that delivers personalized morning news updates.
This strategic pivot comes as Google has regained technological ground. The Mountain View giant has just launched its Gemini 3 model, which surpassed OpenAI’s GPT-5 on industry benchmarks. Meanwhile, rising rival Anthropic also beat OpenAI with its Opus 4.5 model.
Figures show that the momentum is tilting toward Google, which says its monthly active user base rose from 450 million in July to 650 million in October, boosted notably by the August launch of an image generator. Even more telling: according to Similarweb, users now spend more time conversing with Gemini than with ChatGPT, even though OpenAI still holds a wide lead in user numbers with more than 800 million weekly users.
A Strained Business Model
OpenAI’s challenge goes beyond technology. The company faces a major structural disadvantage: it is not profitable and must raise funds almost continuously to survive, unlike Google, which can finance its investments from current revenues. According to its own financial projections, OpenAI would need about $200 billion in revenue to become profitable by 2030.
In his memo, Altman emphasizes the need to deliver substantial improvements to ChatGPT in personalization, speed, reliability, and the ability to answer a wider range of questions. To achieve this, he has instituted daily conference calls with the teams responsible and encouraged temporary transfers between departments.
This “red alert” follows a previous “orange alert.” OpenAI uses a three-color coding system (yellow, orange, red) to rank the urgency of the issues to address.
Despite these difficulties, Altman still has arguments to reassure. In his memo, he said that a new reasoning model planned for next week will surpass Google’s latest Gemini. Nick Turley, head of ChatGPT, also noted on Monday evening on X that the goal is to keep growing “while making ChatGPT even more intuitive and personal.”
Yet this broad mobilization confirms what many suspected: OpenAI’s initial dominance in generative AI now belongs to the past. The long race has only just begun.
