Worrying signs of ChatGPT

Three years after transforming the global tech industry with ChatGPT, OpenAI is under unprecedented pressure. The $500 billion startup’s lead is shrinking as Google and Anthropic continue to make strides in language modeling.

OpenAI is facing a series of internal problems as data center operating costs skyrocket, technical requirements become increasingly complex, and competition to retain talent is fierce. Last month, Google released Gemini 3, a model that experts say has surpassed OpenAI's GPT-5 on many scales of ability.

This achievement comes from improvements that OpenAI has not been able to achieve in recent months, especially in optimizing large-scale model training infrastructure.

OpenAI loses its edge

Thomas Wolf, co-founder of Hugging Face, said the shift represents a completely different landscape than three years ago. Even Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, acknowledged the competitive pressure in a memo to employees last month, saying the company would have to overcome a difficult period before consolidating its lead.

Google’s transformation has been faster than many expected. A year ago, the company was seen as being outpaced by ChatGPT, to the point where Alphabet’s stock price lagged behind other names during its AI-fueled growth spurt. Concerns about the possibility of its search engine being replaced by ChatGPT and new AI search services like Perplexity have added to market skepticism about Google’s future.

OpenAI shows signs of losing steam compared to its competitors. Photo: Bloomberg .

However, the picture has changed since the beginning of this year. A series of impressive updates at the I/O conference in May, along with the popularity of the Nano Banana photo editing tool, has taken the Gemini app from 400 million to 650 million monthly users.

Alphabet shares surged, pushing the company’s market capitalization closer to $4 trillion , a testament to Google’s belief that it can leverage the combined power of search, cloud and device infrastructure to spread AI applications to billions of users.

Koray Kavukcuoglu, chief technology officer at DeepMind, said that using Google’s own tensor processing chips allowed them to train Gemini 3 without relying on Nvidia’s expensive chips. He described this as a distinct advantage for the company, which operates a “full stack,” from hardware infrastructure to consumer services, making it significantly more optimized for the proliferation of AI products.

Google develops rapidly

The positive comments also appeared from analysts. Analyst Michael Nathanson of MoffettNathanson said that Google has found its development rhythm again and the pressure is now more on Sam Altman, in the context that OpenAI must prove its ability to commercialize and operate effectively.

Gemini 3 has been highly praised by the AI research community since its release. Some reviews have shown that this model surpasses GPT-5, while many prominent figures in the industry such as Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff have also shared positive experiences, saying that the gap between the two platforms has changed significantly.

OpenAI has remained open to competition, insisting its models are the benchmark for reliability and performance. But the company is under pressure internally to maintain its pace of innovation, expand its product offering, and compete with rivals with tens of billions of dollars in capital resources.

Gemini is highly rated by many users. Photo: Bloomberg .

Some investors say OpenAI is spreading itself too thin by constantly launching new products, from its automated programming tool to its Sora video app, making it difficult for the company to maintain quality across all areas.

The bigger challenge is infrastructure investment. OpenAI has committed to spending $1.4 trillion over eight years on computing capacity, far exceeding its current revenue and requiring partners to borrow to expand.

OpenAI still leads in terms of user size, with more than 800 million weekly active users. However, data from Similarweb shows that Gemini has surpassed ChatGPT in terms of usage time. In the mobile app category, Gemini has risen significantly in the US and UK, although ChatGPT remains the most popular AI app, according to Sensor Tower .

Source: https://znews.vn/dau-hieu-dang-lo-voi-chatgpt-post1607343.html