I've seen a rumor going around that OpenAI hasn't had a successful pre-training run since mid 2024. This seemed insane to me but if you give ChatGPT 5.1 a query about current events and instruct it not to use the internet it will tell you its knowledge cutoff is June 2024. Not sure if maybe that's just the smaller model or what. But I don't think it's a good sign to get that from any frontier model today, that's 18 months ago.

OpenAI is basically just Netscape at this point. An innovative product with no means of significant revenue generation.

One one side it's up against large competitors with an already established user base and product line that can simply bundle their AI offerings into those products. Google will do just what Microsoft did with Internet Explorer and bundle Gemini in for 'Free' with their already other profitable products and established ad-funded revenue streams.

At the same time, Deepseek/Qwen, etc. are open sourcing stuff to undercut them on the other side. It's a classic squeeze on their already fairly dubious business model.

The way I've experienced "Code Red" is mostly as a euphemism for "on-going company-wide lack of focus" and a band-aid for mid-level management having absolutely no clue how to meaningfully make progress, upper management panicking, and ultimately putting engineers and ICs on the spot to bear the brunt of that organizational mess.

Interestingly enough, apart from Google, I've never seen an organization take the actual proper steps (fire mid-management and PMs) to prevent the same thing from happening again. Will be interesting to see how OAI handles this.

(My apologies if this was already asked - this thread is huge and Find-In-Page-ing for variations of "pre-train", "pretrain", and "train" turned up nothing about this. If this was already asked I'd super-appreciate a pointer to the discussion :) )

Genuine question: How is it possible for OpenAI to NOT successfully pre-train a model?

I understand it's very difficult, but they've already successfully done this and they have a ton of incredibly skilled and knowledgeable, well-paid and highly knowledgeable employees.

I get that there's some randomness involved but it seems like they should be able to (at a minimum) just re-run the pre-training from 2024, yes?

Maybe the process is more ad-hoc (and less reproducible?) than I'm assuming? Is the newer data causing problems for the process that worked in 2024?

Any thoughts or ideas are appreciated, and apologies again if this was asked already!

> We will attempt to directly build safe and beneficial AGI, but will also consider our mission fulfilled if our work aids others to achieve this outcome.

They must be really glad to have so much competition then.

> If a value-aligned, safety-conscious project comes close to building AGI before we do, we commit to stop competing with and start assisting this project.

I wonder if OpenAI will start assisting Google now?

The real code red here is less that Google just one-upped OpenAI but that they demonstrated there’s no moat to be had here.

Absent a major breakthrough all the major providers are just going to keep leapfrogging each other in the most expensive race to the bottom of all time.

Good for tech, but a horrible business and financial picture for these companies.

> 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.

Last week there we had a customer request that landed in our support on a feature that I partially wrote and wrote a pile of public documentation on. Support engineer ran customer query through Claude (trained on our public and internal docs) and it very, very confidently made a bunch of stuff up in the response. It was quite plausible sounding and it would have been great if it worked that way, but it didn't. While explaining why it was wrong in a Slack thread with support engineer and another engineer who also worked on that feature, he ran Augment (that has full source code of the feature) which promptly and also very confidently made up more stuff (but different!). Some choice bleeding eye emojis were exchanged. I'm going to continue to use my own intelligence, thank you.

OpenAI has already lined up enormous long-term commitments — over $500 billion through initiatives like Stargate for U.S. data centers, $250 billion in spending on Microsoft Azure cloud services, and tens of billions on AMD’s plan to deliver 6 GW of Instinct GPUs. Meanwhile, Oracle has financed its role in Stargate with at least $18 billion in corporate bonds plus another $9.6 billion in bank loans, and analysts expect its total capital need for these AI data centers could climb toward $100 billion.

The risk is straightforward: if OpenAI falls behind or can’t generate enough revenue to support these commitments, it would struggle to honor its long-term agreements. That failure would cascade. Oracle, for example, could be left with massive liabilities and no matching revenue stream, putting pressure on its ability to service the debt it already issued.

Given the scale and systemic importance of these projects — touching energy grids, semiconductor supply chains, and national competitiveness — it’s not hard to imagine a future where government intervention becomes necessary. Even though Altman insists he won’t seek a bailout, the incentives may shift if the alternative is a multi-company failure with national-security implications.

WSJ: Altman said OpenAI would be pushing back work on other initiatives, such as advertising, AI agents for health and shopping, and a personal assistant called Pulse.

These plus working with Jony Ive on hardware, makes it sound like they took their eyes off the ball.

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.

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.

I think we are finally seeing the effects of the steady stream of departures of top researchers and leaders from OpenAI since last year. Sure you can declare a "code red", but who is going to lead the effort? Set the direction? Do the heavy lifting? Chart the path forward? Sam Altman is a salesman, not a researcher. Ilya is no longer around. Most of the other top brass has been poached by Google/Meta/Anthropic or left to start their own thing. The people left behind are probably good at iterating, but can they really make the next leap forward on their own?

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.

I remember, maybe 2-3 years ago, chuckling at Google with their Bard naming and being late to the game and so on. It seems like I was very wrong and that they caught up quickly enough. I was also wrong in thinking MS doing well, when their recent Copilot moves across Office, Windows, and GitHub have been a joke.

This is probably not a core concern for most HN readers, but at work we do multilingual testing for synthetic text data generation and natural language processing. Emphasis on multilingual. Gemini has made some serious leaps from 1.5 to 2.5 and now 3.0, and is actually proficient in languages that other models can only dream of. On the other hand, GPT-5 has a really mixed performance in a lot of categories.

It's all about the chip economics. I don't know how the _manufacturing cost_ of Google's TPUs compares to Nvidia's GPUs, for inference of equivalent token throughput.

But at the moment Nvidia's 75-80% gross margin is slowly killing its customers like OpenAI. Eventually Nvidia will drop its margins, because non-0 profit from OpenAI is better than the 0 it'll be if OpenAI doesn't survive. Will be interesting to see if, say, 1/3 the chip cost would make OpenAI gross margin profitable... numbers bandied in this thread of $20B revenue with $115B cost imply they need 1/6 the chip cost, but I doubt those numbers are right (hard to get accurate $ numbers for a private company for the benefit of us arm-chair commenters).

Funny that they did not declare "code red" when the CEO committed to 1.4T investments with only 13B in revenue to show?

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'.

The current situation of OpenAI is difficult. At present time, even the giants (Meta, MS, Apple, AMZN) with deep pockets would find it extremely challenging to compete against Google in the AI race, let alone a VC-funded startup.

•Google has data, a lot of private data actually (YT, Gmail, Workspace, Search Queries.. you name it) •Google has a lot of money •Google has top-talented AI engineers (Eying on DeepMind & Demis Hassabis staff) •Google has a huge userbase

With $20B in ARR and hundreds of billions in funding, would OpenAI be able to make its own remontada as Google did? I'm not sure, but it would be a long challenging journey.

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.

The primary reason I have switched is that creative writing has plummeted on ChatGPT. It is overly eager to censor output that isn't adult but might vaguely be adult if taken incorrectly. This severely limits creative freedom. On the other hand, Gemini happily writes my stories.

I am not sure who OpenAI aims to please by nerfing their own product in this way. It can't be paying customers.

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.

"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.

Title should really be OpenAI declares 'code red' as OpenAI falls behind in the AI race. Google, Anthropic, Mistral, DeepSeek, Tencent, Alibaba, Moonshot, Zai, etc have all made great strides. OpenAI has been falling behind in terms of velocity while everyone else is moving faster

It's just me or this article looks like propaganda? A traditional advertising nice is to plant news attacking your adversaries. This empty article looks like just part of the advertising machine of new Google model release.

Is it really a race? It feels more like a slog. I continue to try to use AI (google, openai, and anthropic), and it continues to be a pain in the ass. Their consumer interfaces are garbage, both being buggy/bloated and clunky to work over multiple threads, with its "memory" being nearly nonexistent outside a single thread. They randomly fail to do the thing they did successfully 5 minutes ago. I struggle to get them to do basic things while other things they do effortlessly. They're bad at logic, spatial reasoning/engineering, and I have to constantly correct them. Often they'll do things in agents that I never asked them to do, and I have to then undo it... The time I used to spend doing things manually, I now spend in fixing the thing that's supposed to be automating the manual work... and no matter how I try to fix it, it finds a new way to randomly fail. I am much happier just doing things by hand.

Since the release of Google Gemini 3 two weeks ago, the seven-day moving average of ChatGPT's daily unique active users has declined by 6%.

https://www.moomoo.com/news/post/62341840/why-has-openai-ini...

Google literally publish the attention paper. Have people not been paying attention? Google has been the only company I’ve been watching that really understands what they are doing.

I have (rather, had) a paid subscription to ChatGPT. I work at my home in the Sierra foothills, and on alternate weeks in my office in San Jose.

Last month, I used ChatGPT while in SJ. I needed a function that's only available to paying customers, and which had worked well from my home. ChatGPT refused to recognize me as a paid-up customer. I had correct login creds + ancillary identifying info, but no go. Over the course of about half an hour, ChatGPT told me in several different ways it wouldn't (not couldn't) attempt to verify my customer status.

I'm now a former ChatGPT customer.

They don't have much to worry about as long as Google keeps focusing on the models and neglecting the experience of actually using them.

Personally I find the current Google products mediocre almost on all aspects. The killer feature of chat bots is voice chat and ChatGPT works great, and Gemini is extremely quiet without a way to increase volume. It's also difficult to figure out how to sign up for Gemini, or even the keyboard that I'm typing is making so many incorrect predictions. I just don't trust Google. To me they're pure marketing and their engineering excellence ended a few years ago.

> Altman said the company will be delaying initiatives like ads, shopping and health agents, and a personal assistant, Pulse, to focus on improving ChatGPT

It's so telling that they're delaying these "festures" because the know full well people don't want them.

This "all hands on deck" thing is a classic tactic managers use when they don't actually know what to do or have the domain expertise to allocate resources intelligently and help their employees do their jobs.

I declared 'code red' at my house as Google, OpenAI and Anthropic catch up in my software development career race.

why couldn't GPT5.1 improve itself? Last I heard, it can produce original math and has phd level intelligence.

Most comments here seem to discuss coding results. I know these are compared against industry benchmarks, but does anyone have experience using these with non CS related tasks? For example the other day I was brainstorming a kayak trip with both ChatGPT and Gemini 3.0. ChatGPT was off the rails. Trying to convince me the river flowed a different sirection than it does, and all sorts of weirdness. Gemini didn't provide information nearly as well as a human with experience, but it wasn't _useless_ information. The OpenAI model was a catasrophe at this. I'd be curious how the different models rate for the general audience, and if that plays into it at all.

This will keep going around the table, next it might be a Chinese company that demos 98% of the capability at 1/4 the price. The objective of being at the cutting edge of LLM performance seems like more of a marketing advantage in the game of sucking in more capital for a moatless technology.

"We’re currently experiencing issues" https://status.openai.com/

But hey they dumped $6.4 billion on Jony Ive. Surely he'll solve all their problems.

Listen, I just had to go through numerous prompt cycles to 'prove' to 5.1 that we had a new Pope. ChatGPT was dead set that I was reading 'unreliable sources'. The data is _old_.

What are devs using to run Gemini agents in vscode? 2.5pro on Cline/Roo was pretty buggy compared to Claude/gpt4/5 (also using Cline /roo), kept getting stuck in loops outputting repeated text and many editing issues, and much much worse than Claude code or codex. Has it gotten better? Is there a better way of using Gemini in vscode?

This sounds like the wrong move- focusing on the product layer and counter positioning on ads is the way to beat G

Most discussion focused on capabilities. But I wonder does OpenAI's "make a even big and costly model" strategy even work in long term? They are already losing money at current size. Unless we have some break though in chip efficiency.(which didn't seem to be likely for now) They are only going to loss even more.

How have OpenAI only just realized this?

Is anyone actually getting good results out of GPT Pro? For coding problems, GPT Thinking seems faster and more accurate. Pro has given me some very dumb answers actually, totally misunderstanding the question. Once I asked it do design a reverse osmosis system for our home, and it suggested a 7k system that can produce 400 liters per minute. Even though I explicitly told it that a couple liters per minute suffice.

I work with Gemini 3 daily, and I think the hype is unwarranted. It takes shortcuts, hallucinates and its UI seems way behind. And what's with the small fonts?

How does Anthropic fit into this? It's much smaller but feels like they have a much clearer product definition with their Claude Code.

Fix: Bring back Ilya, fire Sam Altman.

ChatGPT seems like a huge distraction for OpenAI if their goal is transformative AI

IMO: the largest value creation from AGI won’t come from building a better shopping or travel assistant. The real pot of gold is in workflow / labor automation but obviously they can’t admit that openly.

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

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.

What will it do to Jony Ive’s legacy if his OpenAI device is no more successful than Snapchat’s foray into hardware?

If OpenAI becomes an also-ran by the time the hardware is released, this seems like a real possibility no matter how well-designed it is.

OpenAI is toast. Google has a model advantage, hardware advantage (TPUs), and business advantage (I hear they are good at selling ads).

It is all physics from here.

This sounds like their medicine might be worse than what they're currently doing...

If OpenAI is smart here, they would figure out that you can make more money on a flop than with a hit. I bet an AI would figure that out.

it's hard to get invested into anything google when they've been non stop killing products or making them worse for over a decade.

As for my use cases, google and especially anthropic are not "catching up". They are better for long time already

Why doesnt he ask chat gpt to solve it all? He sells it saying it does everything!

When I was playing poker for living there was a spreadsheet meme. There was always some guy who was losing consistently but declared everything will change from tomorrow because he now made a spreadsheet with an exact plan going forward. The spreadsheet usually contained general things like 8 hours of sleep, healthy food, "be disciplined", "study the game for 2 hours a day" etc.

Of course it never worked because if he knew what he should be doing he would be doing it already instead of hoping for spreadsheet magic to change the course.

>>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.

Sam Altman clearly didn't get the memo.

History doesn't always repeat... but it sure as hell rhymes.

isn't MSFT the one screwed here. Who is on the line to provide more compute for them .

Code red?

Altman should know better. This sends terrible signals to employees, stakeholders and customers.

You don’t solve quality problems by scrambling teams and increasing pressure.

This reeks of terrible management. I can imagine Stanford graduates grinding it past midnight for “the mission”. If any if you is reading this: don’t do it. Altman is screwing you over. There are plenty of other places that won’t code-red your christmas season while having hundreds of billions of dollars in cash.

The fate of OpenAI is effectively sealed - it will go bankrupt and the scraps will get absorbed by Microsoft, for further enshitification. Not necessarily the "end" of AI, but enjoy your account while it's useful.

The problem is, there is a whole ecosystem of businesses operating as OpenAI API wrappers, and those are gonna get screeeeewed.

Source: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/openais-altman-declares-code-red... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46118396)

This is the system working.

Competition is all you need.

Going short OPAI.PVT 10x leverage.

I’ve preferred Claude over ChatGPT for over a year so not sure what he’s on about.

For once, capitalism works

Google is too big to fail. It's the backbone of the Internet. Just YouTube is synonymous with online video.

OpenAI was founded a non-profit to benefit humanity. Why does the "race" matter?

It’s funny because it wasn’t long ago Open Ai was telling everyone else it’s game over.

Related:

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

Does anyone have a link to the contents of the memo?

I have the research to win the race. These people are masters of the fog.

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.

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.

> 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.

    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!

OpenAI fragmented into multiple companies that are now competing against them. OpenAI is buying compute and data.

Meanwhile, Google consolidated their AI operations under Google Deepmind and doubled down on TPUs.

The strategy "solve AGI and then solve everything else" is an all-in gamble that somehow AGI is within reach. This is not true.

I think most people are aligned on AI being in a bubble right now with the disagreement being over which companies (if any) will weather the storm through the burst and come out profitable on the far side.

OpenAI, imo, is absolutely going to crash and burn - it has absolutely underwhelming revenue and model performance compared to others and has made astronomical expenditure commitments. It's very possible that a government bailout partially covers those debts but the chance of the company surviving the burst when it has dug such a deep hole seems slim to none.

I am genuinely surprised that generally fiscally conservative and grounded people like Jensen are still accepting any of that crash risk.

A hardware device from OpenAI is exactly why I would prefer it over Anthropic or Google. Why give up on differentiation? I would assume the model team is separate from the consumer hardware team.

what do you mean "catches up"

Gemini has been as good as GPT for more than a year

OpenAI still somehow gets the edge on the initial veneer of hype, and that's running thin

Surely they can just use AI to go faster and attend their daily calls for them...

Conspiracy time.

>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

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.

You can't make a baby in 1 month with 9 women, Sam.

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Google is shivering! /s

It’s actually code yellow

Word needs need OpenAI and Anthropic like startups to drive AI forward. Think about only Google, Meta, MS, AWS is only have these capabilities. They will never able to do that in one hand, other hand it will be monopolistics. We need more AI startups, not monopolies.