OpenAI’s huge early lead in the race to dominate artificial intelligence is under the greatest pressure since ChatGPT’s launch, as rivals Google and Anthropic gain ground in the cutting-edge technology. Three years on from the debut of its popular chatbot, the $500bn start-up is grappling with the reality of soaring data centre costs, the technical challenges of remaining at the frontier of AI and the constant battle to retain key talent.
It is also facing a resurgent Google, with the release last week of Gemini 3, Google’s latest large language model, which is considered to have leapfrogged OpenAI’s GPT-5 and achieved gains from the model training process that have eluded OpenAI in recent months. “It’s quite a strong difference with the world we had two years ago where OpenAI was leading ahead of everyone else,” said Thomas Wolf, co-founder and chief science officer of open-source start-up Hugging Face. “It’s a new world.”

Full report : OpenAI faces the greatest pressure from rivals since ChatGPT’s debut three years ago; Similarweb says users chat longer with Gemini than with ChatGPT and Claude.