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Sam Altman Declares 'Code Red' for ChatGPT, Delays OpenAI Advertising Plans

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OpenAI is deprioritizing work on advertising as it focuses on improving the quality of ChatGPT, reports The Information. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman declared a "code red" on Monday, and told employees that the company needs to improve ChatGPT so it doesn't fall behind competitors like Google and Anthropic.

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Altman said that OpenAI needs to work on personalization for each user, image generation, and model behavior like speed and reliability.

Google debuted Gemini 3 Pro in November, and it outperforms ChatGPT on several benchmarking tests. Google has been luring users with its Nano Banana AI image generator and Anthropic's Claude is popular with business customers.

OpenAI's plan to start showing customers ads leaked earlier this week, but Altman told employees that ads are now on the backburner. Work on advertising, shopping AI agents, and a more proactive and personalized version ChatGPT assistant called Pulse has been delayed. OpenAI has been testing several kinds of ads, including ads that would be shown during online shopping requests, but introducing ads could push users to other chatbots.

Following the employee memo, ChatGPT lead Nick Turley announced that OpenAI would focus on "making ChatGPT more capable, continue growing, and expand access around the world -- while making it feel even more intuitive and personal."

OpenAI is not profitable, and it has to rely on its user numbers for investments. If it loses a significant number of users to Google, it could run into financial trouble.
chatgpt-logo.jpg


OpenAI will ship a new reasoning model next week, which Altman said is ahead of Gemini 3 in internal evaluations.

Article Link: Sam Altman Declares 'Code Red' for ChatGPT, Delays OpenAI Advertising Plans
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/2025/12/02/openai-delays-ad-plans/
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MacRumors said:
OpenAI is not profitable, and it has to rely on its user numbers for investments. If it loses a significant number of users to Google, it could run into financial trouble.
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That’s an impressive amount of obsequiousness in two sentences. OpenAI is not profitable. It already is in financial trouble, because they are burning investment capital on running costs at far too high a scalę to ever recoup that burnt capital. The vast majority of users do not pay. Even the paid users are not paying enough to make OpenAI sustainable. It doesn’t rely on user numbers for investment, it relies on greed, gullibility and unethical fund managers for investment.
 
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As long as Scam Altman is involved with ChatGPT, not a single chance I’ll ever go back to using that platform. Way too shady and mysterious, just like Alphabet. Very interesting how Scam doesn’t want to mention Grok, considering it outperforms Anthropic, etc. Guess he doesn’t want to give any more advertising than necessary to the leaders in the Ai game
 
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delsoul said:
As long as Scam Altman is involved with ChatGPT, not a single chance I’ll ever go back to using that platform. Way too shady and mysterious, just like Alphabet. Very interesting how Scam doesn’t want to mention Grok, considering it outperforms Anthropic, etc. Guess he doesn’t want to give any more advertising than necessary to the leaders in the Ai game
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Grok should not be taken seriously, Eldon use it as one of his toys 🧸
 
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Sounds like Apple hitched its Improved Siri AI wagon to the right partner. If Apple is licensing Google’s tech, but running it on its own servers where it has control of privacy then I don’t think that’s a bad place to be in until its own competitor is ready. It’s not ideal. Ideal would’ve have been being in the drivers seat, but there are advantages to being an observer if you play your cards right.

Think Google Maps for the early iPhone models until Apple Maps debuted, then think of how long it actually took Apple Maps to be in the same ballpark as Google Maps. They did get there eventually, but it took years.

Apple is years behind in the AI race, but they’ve got the money to catch up if they play the long game. Right now trying out-Zuck Meta by handing out idiotically high compensation packages doesn’t seem to me to be a prudent long term decision. That same talent will be back on the market once the dust from the inevitable coming AI boom and bust settles.

License your tech from a market leader you already have existing multibillion dollar ties with, let the Meta’s of the world burn though cash and flake out, all the while biding your time and brining your own solution along.
 
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Abazigal said:
Hmm, sounds like OpenAI should have embraced an ad-supported model way earlier. Paid subscriptions alone clearly aren’t paying the bills.
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That would have put them in a worse position and just make the competition look better.
 
Nano Banana Pro from Google KILLS OpenAI's ChatGPT with image generation.

Love the competition though... this is all going to get better and faster because of it.
 
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delsoul said:
As long as Scam Altman is involved with ChatGPT, not a single chance I’ll ever go back to using that platform. Way too shady and mysterious, just like Alphabet. Very interesting how Scam doesn’t want to mention Grok, considering it outperforms Anthropic, etc. Guess he doesn’t want to give any more advertising than necessary to the leaders in the Ai game
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If Grok is considered a leader, that tells us all we need to know about how useless this whole misadventure is and how we should look forward to its demise.
 
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Today at work I thought I would ask ChatGPT to write me a Powershell script to stop and start some services on a server in a certain sequence

'Here is your Powershell script' ... great!

Go to run it and ERROR

Pass that error back to ChatGPT and it cheekily responds with 'ah! the code I generated has this section of code which isn't supported by Powershell...'

Rinse and repeat about 10 times and it finally came up with something that worked but it would have probably just been quicker for me to knock something up myself!
 
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I'm sure it's nothing another hundred-billion dollars won't fix.
MacRumors said:
OpenAI is not profitable, and it has to rely on its user numbers for investments. If it loses a significant number of users to Google, it could run into financial trouble.
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I love how a company losing an estimated $3 billion/month, which apparently is so expensive to run it's losing money on its most expensive paid product, let alone the free users, is simply described as "not profitable."
 
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