With competitors making frequent moves, OpenAI has entered a state of emergency.
On December 2nd local time, according to foreign media reports, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman stated in an internal memo sent on Monday that the company has entered a "code red" emergency state. The "red alert" blitz will refocus OpenAI's work on ChatGPT, such as improving its speed, reliability, and personalization capabilities.
Altman stated that OpenAI plans to postpone the development of other products and reduce investment in areas such as health, shopping, and advertising because "we are at a critical moment for ChatGPT."
Recently, Google released its latest large-scale language model, Gemini 3, which is considered to have surpassed GPT-5 in industry benchmarks. Anthropic's latest model, Opus 4.5, also outperforms GPT-5 in key benchmark tests.
According to reports, prior to the release of Gemini 3, Altman stated that OpenAI would need to withstand short-term competitive pressure and remain focused, adding that "the public opinion environment is expected to be quite challenging in the near future."
Nick Turley, Vice President and Head of ChatGPT, said on social media: "Our focus now is on continuing to enhance ChatGPT's capabilities, growing and expanding its global reach—while making it feel more intuitive and personalized."
According to data from network analytics firm Similarweb, OpenAI currently has over 800 million weekly active users, but users spend more time chatting on Gemini than on ChatGPT.
Google stated that the Gemini has 650 million monthly active users, while the AI overview feature appearing at the top of search results has 2 billion monthly active users. Altman had previously congratulated Google on the release, writing that the Gemini 3 looks like a great model.
In recent months, OpenAI has partnered with Oracle to expand its computing power. Nvidia AMD, Microsoft Amazon The signing of agreements by tech giants totaling over a trillion dollars, covering multiple key areas such as computing power and cloud services, has raised concerns about their ability to afford such enormous costs.
Altman stated, "Investing heavily in infrastructure is a strategic gamble at the company level." OpenAI and its partners are betting on the continued exponential growth of AI usage, but the company has a well-thought-out plan, a clear understanding of the direction of its technology and capabilities, and the products and revenue that can be built on this foundation. "Without computing power, we would not be able to generate revenue or continue to launch models of this scale."
Altman stated that large-scale infrastructure projects take time to build, which is precisely why OpenAI needs to begin investing now. He also projected that OpenAI's annualized revenue will exceed $20 billion by the end of this year and grow to hundreds of billions of dollars by 2030.
(Source: The Paper)
