The AI start-up is in trouble.
For nearly three years, Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, was a ChatGPT devotee. Then, late last month, he abruptly converted to Google’s chatbot, Gemini. “Holy shit,” he wrote on X. “I’ve used ChatGPT every day for 3 years. Just spent 2 hours on Gemini 3. I’m not going back. The leap is insane.”
When Gemini 3 was released in mid-November, it appeared to crush OpenAI’s top model on a suite of evaluations shared by Google. The bot has since received widespread praise from the tech industry. One analyst said that Gemini 3 is “the best model ever.” Another crowned Google as the “AI winners.” Sam Altman appears alarmed: Last week, in a company-wide memo, the OpenAI CEO reportedly declared a “code red” effort to improve ChatGPT’s capabilities.
OpenAI once had a clear technological edge. When the firm kicked off the AI race in 2022 with the launch of ChatGPT, Google was caught off guard and declared its own “code red.” Google’s early chatbot offerings were indeed a mess: The very first demo of Bard, the precursor to Gemini, included a factual error. A year later, the “AI Overviews” in Google Search were telling users that it was healthy to eat one rock a day. Meanwhile, OpenAI has become the world’s most valuable private company under the assumption that it will always set the pace. But its ascendance no longer seems inevitable.
The warning lights for OpenAI were flashing even before Google launched Gemini 3. OpenAI has not had a stable or even convincing lead on major AI benchmarks for many months. An image-generating model released by Google this year, called “Nano Banana,” is substantially faster than ChatGPT and has expanded Gemini’s user base—which, by multiple measures, is growing several times faster than ChatGPT’s.
