There will be a daily call for those tasked
with improving the chatbot, the memo said,
and Altman encouraged temporary team transfers
to speed up development.
Truly brilliant software development management going on here. Daily update meetings and temporary staff transfers. Well known strategies for increasing velocity!
> the company will be delaying initiatives like ads, shopping and health agents, and a personal assistant, Pulse, to focus on improving ChatGPT
There's maybe like a few hundred people in the industry who can truly do original work on fundamentally improving a bleeding-edge LLM like ChatGPT, and a whole bunch of people who can do work on ads and shopping. One doesn't seem to get in the way of the other.
> There will be a daily call for those tasked with improving the chatbot, the memo said, and Altman encouraged temporary team transfers to speed up development.
It's incredible how 50 year-old advice from The Mythical Man-Month are still not being heed. Throw in a knee-jerk solution of "daily call" (sound familiar?) for those involved while they are wading knee-deep through work and you have a perfect storm of terrible working conditions. My money is Google, who in my opinion have not only caught up, but surpassed OpenAI with their latest iteration of their AI offerings.
I take this code red as a red flag. Open AI should continue to concern itself with where it will be 5 years from now, not lose sight over concern about where it will 5 months from now.
IMHO Gemini surpassed ChatGPT by quite a bit - I switched. Gemini is faster, the thinking mode gives me reliably better answers and it has a more "business like" conversation attitude which is refreshing in comparison to the over-the-top informal ChatGPT default.
To be honest, this is the first month in almost a year when I didn't pay for ChatGPT Pro and instead went for Gemini Ultra. It's still not there for programming, where I use Claude Max, but for my 'daily driver' (count this, advice on that, 'is this cancer or just a headache' kind of thing), Gemini has finally surpassed ChatGPT for me. And I used to consider it to be the worst of the bunch.
I used to consider Gemini the worst of the bunch, it constantly refused to help me in the past, but not only has it improved, ChatGPT seems to have gone down the 'nerfing' road where it now flat out refuses to do what I ask it to do quite often.
OpenAI was founded to hedge against Google dominating AI and with it the future. It makes me sad how that was lost for pipe dreams (AGI) and terrible leadership.
I fear a Google dystopia. I hope DeepSeek or somebody else will counter-balance their power.
For regular consumers, Gemini's AI pro plan is a tough one to beat. The chat quality has gotten much better, I am able to share my plan with a couple more people in my family leading to proper individual chat histories, I get 2 TB of extra storage (which is also sharable), plus some really nice stuff like NotebookLM, which has been amazing for doing research. Veo/Nanobanana are nice bonuses.
It's easily worth the monthly cost, and I'm happy to pay - something which I didn't even consider doing a year ago. OpenAI just doesn't have the same bundle effect.
Obviously power users and companies will likely consider Anthropic. I don't know what OpenAI's actual product moat is any more outside of a well-known name.
In one of the Indian movies, there is a rather funny line that goes like this "tu jiss school se padh kar aaya hai mein uss school ka headmaster hoon". It would translate like this "The school from which you studied and came? I am the principal of that school". Looks like Google is about to show who the true principal is
We are in a pretty amazing situation. If you're willing to go down 10% in benchmark scores, you easily 25% your costs. Now with Deepseek 3.2 another shot across the bow.
But if the ML, if SOTA intelligence becomes basically a price war, won't that mean that Google (and OpenAI and Microsoft and any other big model) lose big? Especially Google, as the margin even Google cloud (famously a lot lower than Google's other businesses) requires to survive has got to be sizeable.
>realize antitrust heat is rising faster than stock buybacks can hide
>notice a small lab called OpenAI making exotic tech and attracting political fascination
>calculate that nothing freezes regulators like an unpredictable new frontier
>decide to treat OpenAI as an accidental firebreak
>let them sprint ahead unchecked
watch lawmakers panic about hypothetical robot uprisings instead of market concentration
>antitrust hearings shift from “break up the giants” to “what is AGI and should we fear it”
>Google emerges looking ancient, harmless, almost quaint
>pressure dissipates
>execute phase two: acceleration
roll out model updates in compressed cycles
>flood the web with AI-powered services
>redefine “the internet” as “whatever Google’s infrastructure indexes”
>regulators exhausted from chasing OpenAI’s shadow
>Google walks back onto the throne, not by hiding power, but by reframing it as inevitability
conspiracy theorists argue whether this was 5D chess or simple opportunism
>Google search trends spike for “how did this happen”
Heard all the news how Gemini 3 is passing everyone on benchmarks, so quickly tested and still find it a far cry from ChatGPT in real world use when testing questions on both platforms. But importantly the ChatGPT app experience at least for iPhone/Mac users is drastically superior vs Google which feels very Google still. So Gemini would have to be drastically better answer wise than ChatGPT to lure users from a better UI/UX experience to Gemini. But glad to see competition since certainly don't want only one winner in this race.
> But importantly the ChatGPT app experience at least for iPhone/Mac users is drastically superior vs Google which feels very Google still. So Gemini would have to be drastically better answer wise than ChatGPT to lure users from a better UI/UX experience to Gemini.
Opposite is true for a larger market. Gemini is great and available with one button click on most consumer phones. OpenAI will never crack most Android users by this logic of yours
AI creates the possibility to disrupt existing power structures - this is the only reason it gathers so much focus. If it were merely tool that increased efficiency of work, few would care so much. We already frequently get such tools which draw far less attention.
"Code red" feels like theater. Competition is healthy - Google's compute advantage was always going to matter once they got serious. The real question isn't who's ahead this quarter, but whether anyone can maintain a moat when the underlying tech is rapidly commoditizing.
Crazy how we went from google feeling like they were a dinasour who could never catch up to openai, to almost feeling like the opposite in terms of being able to catch up. All within just 1-2 years.
I see google partnering with different companies to mine their data for AI, but I don't see that with OpenAI. They had a good thing going with Microsoft but it looks like that relationship is a bit sour now?
Surely they know that they can't just keep scraping the internet to train models.
If I don't use a Microsoft product, I'd have to go out of my way to use an OpenAI service. But they don't have a specialized "service" (like anthropic and developers) either. Gemini is there by default with Google/Reddit. To retain their first-to-market advantage, they'd need to be the default in more places, or invest in models and services that cater to very specific audiences.
I think their best best is to partner with different entities. But they lost reddit and twitter, and FB is doing their own thing too, so who's left? linkedin? school systems (but ChromeBook has them beat there), perhaps telecoms preloading chatgpt apps into phones?
In my layperson's opinion, I think they have an access problem. Windows 11/Copilot (Github and in windows) seems to be the main access stream and people hate both, and they don't have branding there either, just back-end. There is no device you can buy, service you can get that has an OpenAI branded thing on it as a value added feature.
I'm sure they'll do ok, but i keep hearing they need to do a lot more than just 'ok'.
120 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 83.6 ms ] threadThere's maybe like a few hundred people in the industry who can truly do original work on fundamentally improving a bleeding-edge LLM like ChatGPT, and a whole bunch of people who can do work on ads and shopping. One doesn't seem to get in the way of the other.
It's incredible how 50 year-old advice from The Mythical Man-Month are still not being heed. Throw in a knee-jerk solution of "daily call" (sound familiar?) for those involved while they are wading knee-deep through work and you have a perfect storm of terrible working conditions. My money is Google, who in my opinion have not only caught up, but surpassed OpenAI with their latest iteration of their AI offerings.
I used to consider Gemini the worst of the bunch, it constantly refused to help me in the past, but not only has it improved, ChatGPT seems to have gone down the 'nerfing' road where it now flat out refuses to do what I ask it to do quite often.
I fear a Google dystopia. I hope DeepSeek or somebody else will counter-balance their power.
It's easily worth the monthly cost, and I'm happy to pay - something which I didn't even consider doing a year ago. OpenAI just doesn't have the same bundle effect.
Obviously power users and companies will likely consider Anthropic. I don't know what OpenAI's actual product moat is any more outside of a well-known name.
But if the ML, if SOTA intelligence becomes basically a price war, won't that mean that Google (and OpenAI and Microsoft and any other big model) lose big? Especially Google, as the margin even Google cloud (famously a lot lower than Google's other businesses) requires to survive has got to be sizeable.
>be Google
>watch regulators circle like vultures
>realize antitrust heat is rising faster than stock buybacks can hide
>notice a small lab called OpenAI making exotic tech and attracting political fascination
>calculate that nothing freezes regulators like an unpredictable new frontier
>decide to treat OpenAI as an accidental firebreak
>let them sprint ahead unchecked watch lawmakers panic about hypothetical robot uprisings instead of market concentration
>antitrust hearings shift from “break up the giants” to “what is AGI and should we fear it”
>Google emerges looking ancient, harmless, almost quaint
>pressure dissipates
>execute phase two: acceleration roll out model updates in compressed cycles
>flood the web with AI-powered services
>redefine “the internet” as “whatever Google’s infrastructure indexes”
>regulators exhausted from chasing OpenAI’s shadow
>Google walks back onto the throne, not by hiding power, but by reframing it as inevitability conspiracy theorists argue whether this was 5D chess or simple opportunism
>Google search trends spike for “how did this happen”
>the answer sits in plain sight:
>attention is all you need
Opposite is true for a larger market. Gemini is great and available with one button click on most consumer phones. OpenAI will never crack most Android users by this logic of yours
TPUs vs. GPUs and why Google is positioned to win AI race in the long term
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46069048
Google, Nvidia, and OpenAI
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46108437
Surely they know that they can't just keep scraping the internet to train models.
If I don't use a Microsoft product, I'd have to go out of my way to use an OpenAI service. But they don't have a specialized "service" (like anthropic and developers) either. Gemini is there by default with Google/Reddit. To retain their first-to-market advantage, they'd need to be the default in more places, or invest in models and services that cater to very specific audiences.
I think their best best is to partner with different entities. But they lost reddit and twitter, and FB is doing their own thing too, so who's left? linkedin? school systems (but ChromeBook has them beat there), perhaps telecoms preloading chatgpt apps into phones?
In my layperson's opinion, I think they have an access problem. Windows 11/Copilot (Github and in windows) seems to be the main access stream and people hate both, and they don't have branding there either, just back-end. There is no device you can buy, service you can get that has an OpenAI branded thing on it as a value added feature.
I'm sure they'll do ok, but i keep hearing they need to do a lot more than just 'ok'.