From: zerohedge

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman declared a “code red” on Monday, telling employees that ChatGPT needs serious improvement in terms of user experience – including personalization features, speed, reliability, and allowing it to answer a wider range of questions.

In a companywide memo, Altman also said that OpenAI would be pushing back work on other initiatives, including advertising, AI agents for health and shopping, and a personal assistant called Pulse, the reports. And with hundreds of billions of dollars committed to future data-center investments, they to remain on top at all costs.

The company will now hold daily calls with the team responsible for improving the chatbot, while OpenAI’s head of ChatGPT, Nick Turley, said Monday on X that the company is now focused on making GPT feel “even more intuitive and personable.”

The announcement comes days after a report in the warning that OpenAI rivals from Google and Anthropic are catching up in terms of features and popularity.

“It’s quite a strong difference with the world we had two years ago where OpenAI was leading ahead of everyone else,” Thomas Wolf, co-founder and chief science officer of open-source start-up Hugging Face told . “It’s a new world.”

Gemini’s user base has been rapidly growing since the August release of an image generator – Nano Banana. According to Google, monthly active users have also grown from 450 million in July to 650 million in October.

Anthropic, meanwhile, is also growing in popularity among business customers.

Last month Altman told employees that OpenAI would “need to stay focused through short-term competitive pressure . . . expect the vibes out there to be rough for a bit.”

Meanwhile, OpenAI is at a disadvantage – not only are they profitable, they have to raise money at a near-constant pace to keep their heads above water – something Google and other tech firms that fund growth with revenues don’t have to worry about. OpenAI is also outspending its main startup rival, Anthropic, and needs to grow revenue to roughly $200 billion to even have a chance at turning a profit in 2030.

Google told the that their Big Tech group had “pushed our performance quite significantly” by training their AI models using Google’s own bespoke chips.

“Being able to connect with consumers, customers, companies, at that scale is really something that we can do because of that full stack integrated approach that we have,” said Koray Kavukcuoglu, Google’s AI architect and DeepMind’s chief technology officer.

As Google’s Gemini showed a potential step-change improvement vs ChatGPT, the market has found itself mis-aligned and mis-priced for that…