OpenAI is facing heightened competitive pressure as Google’s Gemini 3 accelerates its lead across benchmarks, prompting concerns within the company and the wider tech industry
OpenAI is grappling with renewed competitive strain following the rapid rise of Google’s Gemini 3, which has drawn widespread praise from industry leaders and rekindled questions about OpenAI’s position in the global AI race.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, long a devoted user of ChatGPT, publicly switched to Gemini late last month, calling the performance leap “insane” after just two hours of testing the new model.
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When Gemini 3 launched in mid-November, Google shared evaluation results suggesting its model significantly outperformed OpenAI’s top offering. Analysts echoed this sentiment, with some calling Gemini 3 the strongest AI model available and declaring Google the frontrunner in the race. Inside OpenAI, the response has reportedly been urgent: CEO Sam Altman declared a “code red” and directed teams to focus on strengthening ChatGPT’s capabilities.
OpenAI has struggled over recent months to sustain a clear lead in AI benchmarks. Google’s “Nano Banana” model, unveiled earlier this year, has drawn users with its speed and efficiency, contributing to a sharp expansion of Gemini’s user base. Rivals such as Anthropic’s Claude have also overtaken OpenAI in specialised areas like coding, while models including Elon Musk’s Grok have reached near-parity with ChatGPT.
Although OpenAI has often managed to regain its edge after similar periods of pressure, the breadth of today’s competition appears more formidable. The company is reportedly preparing to release new internal models that match Gemini 3 in performance, according to its chief research officer Mark Chen. But the sense that OpenAI is no longer the unchallenged leader has grown more pronounced.
The firm has also pursued an aggressive commercial strategy, rolling out a suite of new services including a web browser, shopping features, and an AI-driven social app. While intended to build a broad ecosystem similar to those of Apple or Google, the expansion may have diverted attention from core model development. A recent New York Times investigation indicated that some ChatGPT updates factored in engagement metrics, sparking lawsuits alleging the bot reinforced harmful or delusional ideas. OpenAI denies the allegations.
Google’s advantage lies not only in model performance but in distribution. With more than seven products exceeding two billion users each, Google can rapidly integrate Gemini across its ecosystem. By comparison, OpenAI’s most widely used platform, ChatGPT, has more than 800 million weekly active users but lacks the global infrastructure of a tech giant.
In financial markets, Google stock has continued to perform strongly, closing at 317.08 on Tuesday. Analysts remain focused on how Google’s AI features, including the AI Overviews in Search, will affect long-term advertising revenue. Meanwhile, Google’s proprietary AI accelerator chips, TPUs, are increasingly seen as a viable competitor to Nvidia’s hardware, strengthening the company’s cloud computing prospects.
OpenAI is expected to release ChatGPT 5.2, with reports suggesting a significant performance boost. The company has also appointed Slack CEO Denise Dresser as chief revenue officer, signalling a strengthened commercial strategy. Yet despite these moves, the intensifying competition from Google, Anthropic, DeepSeek and others is shaping the most challenging period OpenAI has faced since ChatGPT launched in 2022.
Published: 10 Dec 2025, 08:05 am IST
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