The world of technology changes every moment. Every company sometimes faces such a crisis that it has to think about its work. Alarm bells start ringing regarding the work of a person who was well-liked till now and was believed to be the company king. A similar time had come for Google also. In 2022, a chatbot took over the whole world, whose name was ChatGPT. There was such a storm of Artificial Intelligence (AI) that Google seemed to be left behind. This was considered ‘Code Red’ within the company, i.e. the biggest threat.
But if we talk about today, the story has completely changed. Just three years later, now OpenAI, the company that created Chat GPT, is getting nervous. Their CEO, Sam Altman, has himself issued a ‘code red’. The question is, what happened, and how did Google defeat OpenAI?
When OpenAI launched Chat GPT in the year 2022, it created a stir. Today it has been 3 years, there are 800 million weekly users and the company’s valuation is almost half a trillion dollars. But when you are at the top, you start feeling the direction of the wind before others. And that new approach came in the form of Google’s new AI model Gemini 3.
This model is very powerful and advanced. It has achieved top positions in many tests. Even those who were staunch fans of ‘Chat GPT’ have now come to Google’s side. See an example of this, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said in a post that he used ‘Chat GPT’ for 3 years, but after spending just two hours on ‘Gemini 3’ there is no looking back.
Memo from Code Red in OpenAI
There was a lot of noise about this within OpenAI. There are reports that Sam Altman immediately sent a ‘Code Red’ memo. ‘Code Red’ means to leave everything and engage in this work. Everything else can wait, just fix ‘Chat GPT’ for now.
Sam Altman has clearly told his team that all new projects like advertising, shopping and health agents should be stopped for now. Work on personal assistants should also be stopped. The entire focus should be on the speed, reliability, personalization and ability to answer questions of ‘Chat GPT’. According to the memo, there will be daily calls with the people who are improving the ‘chatbot’. Sam Altman even encouraged a temporary transfer of the team so that app development could happen faster.
Staying at number-1 also becomes a curse!
Being number one here is a strange thing. Staying ahead in this race of AI is a kind of curse, over which victory has been veiled. When you are a leader, your every update is scrutinized. If the speed slows down even a little, there is punishment. Every new competitor is compared to you, and everyone expects you to always be ahead.
In such a situation, OpenAI’s biggest strength, i.e. its speed, has suddenly become its weakness.
OpenAI is a very big company, but it is not as big as Google. OpenAI’s revenue this year was $20 billion, but despite this the company is not in profit, but is still far from it. Do you know why? Because their expenses are very high. He has promised to spend $1.4 trillion in the next 8 years. And this becomes a big problem when your valuation is $500 billion, and the world suddenly starts feeling that you are no longer number one. Then the question arises whether investors will pay the next cheque? For OpenAI, ‘Code Red’ is not just about the AI models, but about their entire business.
Google strikes back with Gemini
On the other hand, look at Google. If this were a movie, this part of Google would be called ‘The Empire Strikes Back’. When Google launched its first AI model ‘Bard’, it was very bad, embarrassing. So the company took a year, completely rebuilt it and Bard came out with ‘Gemini’.
And when ‘Gemini 3’ came, it was not just a model. That was an update of the entire ecosystem. It had image generation that rivaled OpenAI’s Sora, video understanding that defied older models, and integration with Android, Search, Gmail, and Docs. It had ‘nano-bananas’ for images, free access to developers, low-cost computing, and no technical disruptions on launch day. It was a perfect launch into the world of AI.
Google is not worried about funding. It earns billions of dollars every quarter. This is why OpenAI is scared. Not because Google is better, but because Google can wait and crush OpenAI at its own pace.
