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Investing.com -- OpenAI is tightening its focus on ChatGPT as pressure builds on several fronts, prompting CEO Sam Altman to declare a company-wide “code red” and temporarily halt work on other initiatives, according to an internal memo viewed by The Information and Wall Street Journal.
Altman told employees that OpenAI must sharply improve the day-to-day experience of its chatbot, from personalization and reliability to speed and breadth of answers. He said the company would delay development of advertising, AI agents for health and shopping, and a personal assistant called Pulse.
Teams are being encouraged to shift temporarily toward ChatGPT, with daily calls planned for those directly responsible for user experience improvements.
The memo underscores the competitive pressure reshaping the landscape. Google has emerged as the most immediate concern after releasing an updated version of its Gemini model that surpassed OpenAI’s systems on key benchmarks and boosted the company’s share price.
Gemini’s user base has climbed rapidly, helped by tools such as the Nano Banana image generator. Monthly active users rose from 450 million in July to 650 million in October, tightening the race for consumer adoption. OpenAI is also facing renewed competition from Anthropic, which has gained traction among enterprise clients.
Deutsche Bank analysts say OpenAI now confronts three structural risks: slowing subscription growth despite rising user numbers, the rise of substitutes such as Google’s Gemini 3, and the burden of $1.4 trillion in investment planned for data-center infrastructure.
"When it launched ChatGPT on November 30, 2022, it had an open road ahead of it. Users skyrocketed past 100 million in less than three months, no model could touch it for well over a year and investors piled into it, giving it a $500 billion valuation," analysts Adrian Cox and Stefan Abrudan said in a note.
"But being a bigger company brings bigger problems, exacerbated as it carries the weight of expectations for the AI boom on its shoulders," they added.
That slowdown matters because OpenAI is not profitable and must raise capital continuously, leaving it at a disadvantage relative to deep-pocketed rivals. The company is spending more aggressively than Anthropic and, according to its own projections, will need to scale revenue to roughly $200 billion to reach profitability in 2030.
With hundreds of billions of dollars in future data-center commitments, concerns about OpenAI’s financial trajectory have contributed to volatility in the shares of partners such as Nvidia, Microsoft and Oracle.
Even so, Altman described continued progress in research, telling employees that a new reasoning model set for release next week is ahead of Google’s latest Gemini system.
The company also continues to rely on its massive user base, which he said now exceeds 800 million weekly users, as evidence of sustained product strength. On Monday evening, the head of ChatGPT, Nick Turley, said the team is working to make the chatbot “even more intuitive and personal.”