OpenAI faces its toughest challenger yet
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Illustration: Brendan Lynch/Axios
The world's most popular chatbot, ChatGPT, faces new threats from its biggest competitor: Google's Gemini.
Why it matters: Google was caught on the back foot when OpenAI released ChatGPT three years ago. With the release of, and rave reviews for, Gemini 3 Pro, the script has flipped.
The big picture: Google's new Gemini 3 model is forcing a reckoning at OpenAI.
- CEO Sam Altman told staffers to brace for "rough vibes" and "temporary economic headwinds" as the company works to catch up, per The Information.
- Tech history is full of toppled incumbents — Betamax, AltaVista, MySpace, Friendster — but the AI race moves at a far faster clip. Today's leader could be tomorrow's laggard.
- Even before Gemini 3, OpenAI was already confronting declining engagement, Sources.news reported, as content restrictions designed for user safety squeezed consumption.
State of play: On Nov. 18, Google released Gemini 3 Pro, the latest version of its AI model that will power the company's core search engine and the Gemini app.
- Analysts, users, and industry insiders say Gemini 3's superior benchmarks, integration into Google's ecosystem, and cost efficiencies are pressuring OpenAI, especially after GPT-5's underwhelming August release.
- After spending two hours using Gemini 3, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff posted on X: "I'm not going back. The leap is insane — reasoning, speed, images, video… everything is sharper and faster. It feels like the world just changed, again."
Reality check: Not everyone is as enamored with Gemini as Benioff.
- "Google is unmatched at the data [it] can train on," Shanea Leven, ex-Googler and current CEO of Empromptu.ai, told Axios in an email.
- This means the model is trained on a wider array of specialized topics. But when Gemini doesn't know about a topic, Leven says she finds it much more willing than ChatGPT-5 to hallucinate an answer.
Zoom out: Generative AI arguably began with Google's 2017 Transformer paper. Much of the technology underlying OpenAI and Anthropic's models traces back to Google, and many current and former researchers at both companies started their careers there.
- Google has nearly every structural advantage: vast revenue and cloud scale, plus the resources to distribute new AI features to billions of users overnight.
- The company is also one of Nvidia's few real competitors in terms of creating its own chips.
- The biggest surprise about Google's rapid gains is how long they took.
Yes, but: OpenAI retains strong brand loyalty from a user base of around 800 million weekly active users.
- OpenAI has been adding memory features to ChatGPT that allow it to give users answers customized to their preferences and prompt history. It's possible — but not easy — to export that history from ChatGPT and import it into Gemini.
What we're watching: Gemini 3 now leads many benchmark tests and could extend that lead when Google's enhanced reasoning mode Gemini 3 Deep Think becomes widely available.
