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 sector.
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 talent.
It is also facing a resurgent Google, with the release last month 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.”
