Why Has Sam Altman Declared Code Red Over Google’s Gemini 3?

Ready, set, go! The AI race is on, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT is increasingly seeing competitors in the rear-view mirror.

The likes of Anthropic and Meta are catching up, but CEO Sam Altman has expressed his concern over Google’s Gemini 3.

In an internal memo to employees on 1 December, Sam said he was declaring a “Code Red” to encourage greater improvement of ChatGPT, according to The Information.

Gemini 3 was launched on November 18 during what Google described as a one-day rollout across its entire ecosystem, marking the fastest integration of a model into Google Search.

In the note, Sam urges the firm’s workforce to focus on improving the quality of the chatbot while delaying other plans, including the integration of ads.

Rumours had started to swirl this week that ChatGPT users may have to deal with advertisements in the future. A post on X by developer Tibor Blaho on 29 November shared an image of some code from ChatGPT’s Android app reading “com.openai.feature.ads”.

The CEO has also urged staff to work on ChatGPT’s “day-to-day experience”, according to the Wall Street Journal, including improvements to personalisation features, faster and more reliable responses and the ability to “answer a wide range of questions”.

Three years of ChatGPT

ChatGPT celebrated its 3rd birthday on 30 November, marking three years since Google CEO Sundar Pichai sounded his own code red over Sam’s rapid rollout.

Speaking at Salesforce’s annual technology event, Dreamforce, on 17 October, Sundar shared his reaction to the release of ChatGPT when host and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff asked how Google reacted as the “absolute leader in AI” when “this little company in San Francisco” took the lead.

In response, Sundar said that Google was already developing a chatbot at the time but the technology wasn’t there yet.

“We were making a lot of progress,” he said, “but credit to OpenAI, you know, they put it out first.”

He added: “We knew in a different world, we would’ve probably launched our chatbot maybe a few months down the line.

“We hadn’t quite gotten it to a level where you could put it out and people would’ve been okay with Google putting out that product.”

When Sam released his product, Sundar said that “contrary to belief” he was excited because “the window had shifted” and it presented an opportunity to “seize the moment and execute well as a company”.

The tech CEO added: “We had been building this tech for so long, we were so AI native. I had decided to take a full stack approach to AI, we were investing all the way from infrastructure, we built our own chips, we had world class research teams: Google Research, Google Brain and Google DeepMind.”

The new Gemini

The release of Google’s new chatbot model has sparked praise for its creative writing abilities and its new Nano Banana Pro image generator.

The development gives the software new capabilities in reasoning, multimodal understanding and action oriented tasks.

Marc shared an X post on 23 November saying: “I’ve used ChatGPT every day for three years. Just spent two hours on Gemini 3. I’m not going back.”

He added: “The leap is insane - reasoning, speed, images, video… everything is sharper and faster. It feels like the world just changed, again.”

Sam also shared a post: “Congrats to Google on Gemini 3! Looks like a great model.”