OpenAI declares ‘code red’ as Sam Altman pauses ChatGPT ad rollout amid rising competition from Gemini: Report

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has told employees that the ChatGPT maker is declaring a code red in order to improve the quality of the company's popular chatbot. The news came to light via an internal memo quoted by The Information and The Wall Street Journal.
Reportedly, OpenAI had earlier declared code orange to improve ChatGPT. The company is said to have three colour codes to mark the severity of problems, with red being the highest priority, followed by orange and yellow.
The San Francisco based AI startup is also said to be working on improving the day to day experience of users with ChatGPT, including improving personalisation features, increasing its speed and reliability and allowing it to answer a wider range of questions.
OpenAI reportedly delays ad plans
In the memo, Altman reportedly said that OpenAI would be pushing back on some of the other initiatives by the company, like bringing ads to ChatGPT, AI agents for health and shopping and the personal assistant Pulse.
Notably, Pulse is a research assistant that OpenAI unveiled a couple of months ago to allow users to get a daily digest of big updates based on their interests and past interactions with ChatGPT. In fact, Altman had gone on to call it one of his favourite features of ChatGPT.
Reportedly, Altman also encouraged temporary team transfers and called for a daily call with those responsible for improving ChatGPT.
Meanwhile, Nick Turley, head of ChatGPT, said in a post on X on Monday that the company is focused on making ChatGPT feel more intuitive and personal.
He wrote, “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. Thanks for an incredible three years. Lots more to do!”
As per SimilarWeb data, OpenAI continues to hold over 70 percent market share in the generative AI market, but the company has been losing ground in the last few months, particularly to Google's Gemini, which has now crossed the 15 percent mark for the first time.
Gemini had a viral moment a few months back when its Nano Banana model was used to edit images into different styles with strong character consistency and support for adding multiple subjects. Since then, the company has hardly put a foot wrong, with its Gemini 3 Pro model widely believed to outshine OpenAI's offering, while the Nano Banana Pro model has ranked at the top of benchmarks for creating and editing images.