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.