Sam Altman is feeling the pressure.
OpenAI’s CEO sent a memo to staff on Monday outlining a “Code Red” effort to improve the chatbot ChatGPT, according to multiple reports. According to the report, Altman said that OpenAI will be withdrawing investments in areas such as health, shopping, and advertising in order to prioritize ChatGPT.
OpenAI declined to comment Tuesday.
“Our focus now is to further enhance ChatGPT’s capabilities to make it more intuitive and personal as we continue to grow and expand access around the world,” Nick Turley, head of ChatGPT at OpenAI, said in a post on X on Monday.
The memo was first reported by the Information.
More than 800 million people use ChatGPT every week, but the company faces increasingly intense competition from rivals such as: google And humanity.
Last month, Google announced its latest artificial intelligence model, Gemini 3, which exceeded industry benchmarks and received widespread praise from users, researchers, and developers across social media.
The company says its Gemini app has 650 million monthly active users, and AI Overviews, which appear at the top of search results, has 2 billion monthly users.
Altman congratulated Google on the launch in a post about the X last month, writing that the Gemini 3 “looks like a great model.”
Meanwhile, Anthropic is showing strong momentum for the company.
As of September, the startup announced it had more than 300,000 customers, up from less than 1,000 just two years ago. Anthropic defines large accounts as customers with run-rate revenue of more than $100,000 each, which the company says has grown more than seven times over the past year.
OpenAI was founded in 2015 as a nonprofit research organization, but after launching ChatGPT three years ago, it quickly became one of the fastest-growing commercial organizations on the planet.
The company’s valuation has ballooned to $500 billion as it works to roll out its technology around the world.
In recent months, OpenAI has been on a blitz of deal-closing deals, signing more than $1.4 trillion in infrastructure contracts. This staggering amount raised eyebrows and questions about how the company would be able to cover these commitments.
Altman has repeatedly dismissed concerns.
OpenAI said last month that it expects annual revenue to reach more than $20 billion this year and plans to grow revenue to hundreds of billions of dollars by 2030.
In a lengthy post to X in November, Altman said the company needed to start now because building large-scale infrastructure projects takes time.
“This is a bet we are making, and given our favorable position, we are comfortable with it,” Altman wrote.
A few weeks later, Altman seems to be feeling the heat.
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