OpenAI is under pressure as Google, Anthropic gain ground
Sam Altman is feeling the pressure.
The OpenAI CEO sent a memo to his staffers on Monday outlining a “code red” effort to improve its chatbot ChatGPT, according to multiple reports. Altman said OpenAI will be pulling back on investments in areas like health, shopping and advertising as it works to prioritize ChatGPT, the reports said.
OpenAI declined to comment on Tuesday.
“Our focus now is to keep making ChatGPT more capable, continue growing, and expand access around the world — while making it feel even more intuitive and personal,” Nick Turley, head of ChatGPT at OpenAI, wrote in a post Monday on X.
The Information was first to report on the memo.
More than 800 million people use ChatGPT each week, but the company is facing increasingly stiff competition from rivals like Google and Anthropic.
Google announced its latest artificial intelligence model, Gemini 3, last month, which topped industry benchmarks and was widely lauded by users, researchers and developers across social media.
The company said its Gemini app has 650 million monthly active users while AI Overviews, which appear at the top of search results, have 2 billion monthly users.
Altman congratulated Google on the launch, writing in a post on X last month that Gemini 3 “looks like a great model.”
Anthropic, meanwhile, has shown strong momentum with enterprises.
As of September, the startup said it has more than 300,000 business customers, up from less than 1,000 just two years ago. Large accounts, which Anthropic defines as customers that each represent more than $100,000 in run-rate revenue, grew more than seven times in the past year, the company said.
OpenAI launched as a nonprofit research lab in 2015, but has quickly become one of the fastest-growing commercial entities on the planet following the launch of ChatGPT three years ago.
The company’s valuation has swelled to $500 billion as it’s worked to deploy its technology around the globe.
In recent months, OpenAI has made more $1.4 trillion in infrastructure commitments in a deal-making blitz. The staggering sum has raised eyebrows and prompted questions about how the company will be able to afford those commitments.
Altman has repeatedly brushed off concerns.
Last month, OpenAI said it is on track to reach more than $20 billion in annualized revenue run rate this year, with plans to grow to hundreds of billions in sales by 2030.
In a lengthy post on X in November, Altman said large infrastructure projects take time to build, which is why the company needed to start now.
“This is the bet we are making, and given our vantage point, we feel good about it,” Altman wrote.
Weeks later, Altman seems to be feeling the heat.
WATCH: Enterprise AI adoption will be crucial to ChatGPT’s success, says Big Technology’s Alex Kantrowitz
Beta Technologies shares surged more than 9% after air taxi maker Eve Air Mobility announced an up to $1 billion deal to buy motors from the Vermont-based company.
Eve, which was started by Brazilian airplane maker Embraer and is now under Eve Holding, said the manufacturing deal could equal as much as $1 billion over 10 years. The Florida-based company said it has a backlog of 2,800 vehicles.
Shares of Eve Holding gained 14%.
Eve CEO Johann Bordais called the deal a “pivotal milestone” in the advancement of the company’s electric vertical takeoff and landing, or eVTOL, technology.
“Their electric motor technology will play a critical role in powering our aircraft during cruise, supporting the maturity of our propulsion architecture as we progress toward entry into service,” he said in a release.
Mateusz Slodkowski | SOPA Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images
Amazon’s cloud unit on Tuesday announced AI-enabled software designed to help clients better understand and recover from outages.
DevOps Agent, as the artificial intelligence tool from Amazon Web Services is called, predicts the cause of technical hiccups using input from third-party tools such as Datadog and Dynatrace. AWS said customers can sign up to use the tool Tuesday in a preview, before Amazon starts charging for the service.
The AI outage tool from AWS is intended to help companies more quickly figure out what caused an outage and implement fixes, Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of agentic AI at AWS, told CNBC. It’s what site reliability engineers, or SREs, do at many companies that provide online services.
SREs try to prevent downtime and jump into action during live incidents. Startups such as Resolve and Traversal have started marketing AI assistants for these experts. Microsoft’s Azure cloud group introduced an SRE Agent in May.
Rather than waiting for on-call staff members to figure out what happened, the AWS DevOps Agent automatically assigns work to agents that look into different hypotheses, Sivasubramanian said.
“By the time the on-call ops team member dials in, they have an incident report with preliminary investigation of what could be the likely outcome, and then suggest what could be the remediation as well,” Sivasubramanian told CNBC ahead of AWS’ Reinvent conference in Las Vegas this week.
Commonwealth Bank of Australia has tested the AWS DevOps Agent. In under 15 minutes, the software found the root cause of an issue that would have taken a veteran engineer hours, AWS said in a statement.
The tool relies on Amazon’s in-house AI models and those from other providers, a spokesperson said.
AWS has been selling software in addition to raw infrastructure for many years. Amazon was early to start renting out server space and storage to developers since the mid-2000s, and technology companies such as Google, Microsoft and Oracle have followed.
Since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, these cloud infrastructure providers have been trying to demonstrate how generative AI models, which are often training in large cloud computing data centers, can speed up work for software developers.
Over the summer, Amazon announced Kiro, a so-called vibe coding tool that produces and modifies source code based on user text prompts. In November, Google debuted similar software for individual software developers called Antigravity, and Microsoft sells subscriptions to GitHub Copilot.
WATCH: Amazon rolls out AI-powered tools to help big AWS customers update old software
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