OpenAI CEO Sam Altman declared a “code red” state of high alert due to the need to fundamentally improve ChatGPT.
In an internal memo sent out on Monday, Altman said that this “mobilization” of forces will refocus OpenAI’s work primarily on ChatGPT, specifically on increasing the speed, reliability and personalization of the chatbot, which so far dominates the market.
He told employees that the $500 billion startup plans to delay other projects because “a critical period has come for ChatGPT.”
In practice, that means the company will shelve plans to develop advertising products, artificial intelligence agents designed to automate shopping and health tasks, as well as a Pulse product to create personalized morning reports for users. The details of the report were first reported by The Information, which was linked to by the Financial Times.
This strategic turnaround comes at a time when OpenAI faces increasing competition, rising data center costs, technical challenges to stay on the cutting edge of AI development, and a constant struggle to retain key talent.
Last month, Google released its latest major language model, Gemini 3, which according to industry benchmarks leapfrogged OpenAI’s GPT-5 model. Also, Anthropic’s latest model, the Opus 4.5, outperformed the GPT-5 in key benchmarks.
Koray Kavukcuoglu, AI architect at Google and CTO of DeepMind, said the tech giant has “advanced performance in a very fundamental way” by training models on Google’s own custom-made chips. The company also announced that it will immediately integrate its latest AI models into products.
The firm also said it has improved the methods used to train models, an area where OpenAI has struggled recently.
Even before the launch of Gemini 3, Altman stated that OpenAI will need to focus to withstand short-term competitive pressure. “Expect the atmosphere to be rough for a while,” he reportedly said.
Nick Turley, vice president and head of ChatGPT, wrote on the X Network Monday night: “Search is one of the biggest opportunities. ChatGPT now accounts for roughly 10 percent of search activity and is growing rapidly.” “Our focus now is to make ChatGPT even more capable, to continue to grow and expand globally – while making it even more intuitive and personal,” he added.
With more than 800 million weekly users, OpenAI has a huge market share of overall chatbot usage, but according to data from analytics company Similarweb, people spend more time conversing with Gemini than with ChatGPT.