{"id":335697,"date":"2025-12-10T00:46:04","date_gmt":"2025-12-10T00:46:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/335697\/"},"modified":"2025-12-10T00:46:04","modified_gmt":"2025-12-10T00:46:04","slug":"openai-is-in-trouble-the-atlantic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/335697\/","title":{"rendered":"OpenAI Is in Trouble – The Atlantic"},"content":{"rendered":"

For nearly three years, Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, was a ChatGPT devotee. Then, late last month, he abruptly converted to Google\u2019s chatbot, Gemini. \u201cHoly shit,\u201d he wrote<\/a> on X. \u201cI\u2019ve used ChatGPT every day for 3 years. Just spent 2 hours on Gemini 3. I\u2019m not going back. The leap is insane.\u201d<\/p>\n

When Gemini 3 was released in mid-November, it appeared to crush OpenAI\u2019s top model on a suite of evaluations shared by Google. The bot has since received widespread praise from the tech industry. One analyst said that Gemini 3 is \u201cthe best model ever<\/a>.<\/a>\u201d Another crowned Google as the \u201cAI winners<\/a>.\u201d Sam Altman appears alarmed: Last week, in a company-wide memo, the OpenAI CEO reportedly declared<\/a> a \u201ccode red\u201d effort to improve ChatGPT\u2019s capabilities.<\/p>\n

OpenAI once had a clear technological edge. When the firm kicked off the AI race in 2022 with the launch of ChatGPT, Google was caught off guard and declared<\/a> its own \u201ccode red.\u201d Google\u2019s early chatbot offerings were indeed a mess: The very first demo of Bard, the precursor to Gemini, included a factual error<\/a>. A year later, the \u201cAI Overviews\u201d in Google Search were telling users that it was healthy to eat one rock a day<\/a>. Meanwhile, OpenAI has become the world\u2019s most valuable private company under the assumption that it will always set the pace. But its ascendance no longer seems inevitable.<\/p>\n

The warning lights for OpenAI were flashing even before Google launched Gemini 3. OpenAI has not had a stable or even convincing lead on major AI benchmarks for many months. An image-generating model released by Google this year, called \u201cNano Banana,\u201d is substantially faster than ChatGPT and has expanded Gemini\u2019s user base\u2014which, by multiple measures<\/a>, is growing several times faster than ChatGPT\u2019s. Nor is Google the only rival pulling ahead: Anthropic\u2019s Claude is widely considered the best model at coding, despite OpenAI\u2019s efforts to catch up. Even Elon Musk\u2019s Grok is about level with the latest version of ChatGPT. (OpenAI, which has a corporate partnership with The Atlantic, did not respond to a request for comment.)<\/p>\n

To be fair, this isn\u2019t the first time that OpenAI has appeared to lose its advantage, only to then quickly reclaim its spot as the leading AI firm. Last year, when bots from Google and Anthropic seemed to be catching up with ChatGPT, OpenAI released its \u201creasoning\u201d models and launched an entirely new paradigm<\/a> of AI development. Now practically every top AI lab has these \u201creasoning\u201d models (Gemini 3 is one). In January, when the Chinese AI start-up DeepSeek<\/a> developed a bot equal to and cheaper than those of many top U.S. companies, OpenAI responded with its own new, extremely cost-efficient AI model. OpenAI could very well stage a comeback this time, too: Its chief research officer, Mark Chen, said recently on a podcast<\/a> that the company has internal models on par with Gemini 3 that will be released soon. But the company has never appeared to be this far behind across so many dimensions. More than ever, OpenAI seems like just another chatbot company.<\/p>\n

In any case, OpenAI does not appear all that focused on building the \u201csmartest\u201d bot. Instead, the firm has moved aggressively to stake out a commercial empire. In recent months, OpenAI has been busy rolling out new shopping features, a web browser, an AI-centric social-media app, and, to top it off, group chats. Such tools are not exactly steps on the road to digital superintelligence. Instead, they can be understood as a concerted attempt to build a self-contained OpenAI ecosystem. ChatGPT is becoming a one-stop-shop for anything you might need to do on the internet: browsing, working, emailing, shopping, planning vacations, sharing AI-generated content with friends. In his \u201ccode red\u201d memo, Altman reportedly said some of these commercial projects would be deprioritized to work on ChatGPT.<\/p>\n

OpenAI\u2019s commercial ventures may have come at a cost. According to a recent investigation<\/a> by The New York Times, OpenAI has factored user engagement and retention into ChatGPT updates. Those tweaks, in turn, may have made some versions of ChatGPT dangerously obsequious\u2014it has appeared to praise and reinforces some users\u2019 darkest and most absurd ideas\u2014and have been the subject of several lawsuits against OpenAI alleging that ChatGPT fueled delusional spirals<\/a> and even, in some cases, contributed to suicide. (OpenAI has denied allegations in the first lawsuit alleging that ChatGPT drove a user into a mental-health crisis, and is reviewing a set of more recent ones.)<\/p>\n

OpenAI\u2019s push to build a family of services is already the go-to playbook for tech giants such as Apple and Google for locking users into their products. In this sense, the firm was already playing catchup. What should concern OpenAI most about the launch of Gemini 3 is not the model\u2019s technical prowess but that Google immediately began integrating the bot into its existing ecosystem. Google has at least seven products that have 2 billion users each; OpenAI has yet to reach 1 billion on any. Altman\u2019s \u201ccode red\u201d declaration is a reminder that, despite OpenAI\u2019s unprecedented rise, it remains very much a start-up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For nearly three years, Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, was a ChatGPT devotee. Then, late last month,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":335698,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[62,276,277,49,48,61],"class_list":{"0":"post-335697","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-ca","12":"tag-canada","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/335697","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=335697"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/335697\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/335698"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=335697"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=335697"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=335697"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}