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

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.

chatgpt logo
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

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

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Top Rated Comments

Happy_John Avatar
2 weeks ago

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.

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.
Score: 38 Votes (Like | Disagree)
jz0309 Avatar
2 weeks ago
wonder whether he asked chatgpt what users think of ads ...
Most amazing to me is that people still do business with this guy
Score: 26 Votes (Like | Disagree)
delsoul Avatar
2 weeks ago
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
Score: 20 Votes (Like | Disagree)
1d1otic Avatar
2 weeks ago
This proves that Nvidia does not and can not dominate the AI market since Google used their own chips, TPU. So it would be a great opportunity for Apple to develop their own NPU for their own AI models and services in near future.
Score: 16 Votes (Like | Disagree)
haemolysis Avatar
2 weeks ago
Truly remarkable that progress in AI is so fast that we finished the Moore's law phase, got to the plateaux phase, and we are now already at the en-poop-ification phase.
Score: 15 Votes (Like | Disagree)
cjsuk Avatar
2 weeks ago
Time to restructure my investments into popcorn and toilet paper I think.
Score: 13 Votes (Like | Disagree)