That is the thought I had, yesterday, 5 hours after I wrote my piece, I still saw the news appear all over the media, some on it was getting a ridiculous amount of attention, so I decided to take another look at some of this. First there was the Business insider (at https://www.businessinsider.com/openai-code-red-chatgpt-advertising-google-search-gemini-2025-12) giving us ‘OpenAI’s Code Red: Protect the loop, delay the loot’ where we see “Focus on improving ChatGPT, and pause lower-priority initiatives. The most striking pause is advertising. Why delay such a lucrative opportunity at a moment when OpenAI’s finances face intense scrutiny? Because in tech, nothing matters more than users.” This was followed by “Every query and click fed a feedback loop: user behavior informed ranking systems, which improved results, which attracted more users. Over time, that loop became an impenetrable moat. Competing with it has proven nearly impossible.
ChatGPT occupies a similar position for AI assistants. Nearly a billion people now interact with it weekly, giving OpenAI an unmatched new window into human intent, curiosity, and decision-making. Each prompt and reply can be fed back into model training, evaluations, and reinforcement learning to strengthen what is arguably the world’s most powerful AI feedback loop.” All this makes sense, it comes with the nearly mandatory “Google’s Gemini 3 rollout has lured new users. If ChatGPT’s quality slips or feels cluttered, defecting to Google becomes easier. Introducing ads now risks exactly that. Even mildly irritated users could view ads as one annoyance too many.” Whilst in the background we are ‘sensitive’ to “OpenAI has already committed to spending hundreds of billions of dollars on infrastructure to serve ChatGPT at a global scale. At some point, those bills will force the company to monetize more aggressively.
If OpenAI manages to build even half of Google’s Search ads business in an AI-native form, it could generate roughly $50 billion in annual profit. That’s one way to fund its colossal ambitions.” This gives OpenAI a two sided blade in the back. It was a good ploy, but that ploy is deemed to be counter productive and I get that, but dropping the ads might sting with the investors as It was the dimes that they were seeing coming their way and ChatGPT needs to make a smooth entry all the way to the next update, which will be near impossible to avoid in several ways. Google has the inside track now and whilst there are a few settings that are ‘malleable’ for the users, the smooth look is essential for ChatGPT to continue. And that is before other start looking at the low quality data it verifies against. Google has, as I see it, exactly the same problem, but as I see it, ChatGPT gets it now in advance.
Newcomer (at https://www.newcomer.co/p/openais-code-red-shows-the-power) gives us “In truth, as Newcomer’s Tom Dotan wrote back in April, Google, with all of its formidable assets, was never very far behind. Nor is it currently very far ahead. Anthropic too has always been essentially neck-and-neck with OpenAI on the core technology. The capabilities of the big foundation models, and even some lighter ones like DeepSeek, are broadly similar. Marc Benioff, himself a skilled practitioner in the arts of attention, even claimed this week that the big models will be interchangeable commodities, like disk drives. Yet the perception of who’s on top matters quite a lot at a moment when consumers, enterprise technology buyers, and investors are all deciding where to place some highly consequential long-term bets. That brings us back to Altman’s “Code Red.”” Is a truth in itself, but the next part “while the alarm came in a company-wide memo that wasn’t officially announced publicly, we can stipulate that the “leak” of the memo, if not necessarily orchestrated, was almost certainly part of the plan. A media maestro like Altman surely knew that a memo going out to thousands of employees with charged language like “Code Red” was all but guaranteed to make its way to the press. Publicizing a panicked internal reaction to a competitor’s new product might seem like a counter-intuitive way to maintain your reputation as the industry leader.” As I see it, someone in Microsoft marketing earned his dollars in marketing that day, but this is a personal feeling, I have no data to back it up. It is now up to Sam Altman to deliver his ‘new’ version in the coming week and it better the a great new release, or as I see it, there will be heads rolling all over the floor and Sam Altman knows that the pressure is up. I don’t think he is scared as some media says, but he is definitely worried, because this setting will set the record of $13 billion straight, into or away from Microsoft and Sam Altman knows this, as such he is probably a little worried and in a software release any of a hundred things can go wrong and they all need to go right at present.
Then we get “Altman and OpenAI are so good at making news that it’s sometimes hard to tell what’s real.” So, isn’t that the setting all the time? I have always seen Sam Altman as a bad second hands car salesman, That is my take, but I have had a healthy disgust for salespeople for over 30 years. I am a service person, Technical support, customer support. That was always my field. I am not against sales, merely against cleaning up their messes. At times this comes with the territory, shit happens, but those salespeople overselling something just so that they can fill their pipeline and make their numbers are not acceptable to me. To illustrate this, A little setting (devoid of names and brands) “A salesperson came to me with what he needed. We could not do that and I told him, so off he goes calling every technical support person on the planet until he found one that agreed with him and then he sold the solution to the customer and hung that persona name on this. I had to clean up the mess and set up a credit invoice, but after I went through the whole 9 yards making it over 30 days ensuring him that he kept his commission” that is the type I am disgusted with because the brands as a whole suffers, all for the need of greed. It is short sighted thinking. I goes nowhere, but his monthly revenue was guaranteed. And I feel that Sam Altman is not completely like that, but it is the ‘offset’ of salespeople that I carry within me. For me protecting the product and the customer are first and foremost on my mind.
Then we get Futurism (at https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/openai-is-suddenly-in-major-trouble) where we see ‘OpenAI Is Suddenly in Major Trouble’ OK, is this true? We are given “The financial stakes are almost comical in their magnitude: The company is lighting billions of dollars on fire, with no end in sight; it’s committed to spending well over $1 trillion over the next several years while simultaneously losing a staggering sum each quarter. And revenues are lagging far behind, with the vast majority of ChatGPT users balking at the idea of paying for a subscription.” I don’t agree with this setting. You either pay, or you see advertisement that is the setting. There are no free rides and the sooner you realise this, the easier this gets. Then we are given “Meanwhile, Google has made major strides, quickly catching up with OpenAI’s claimed 800 million or so weekly active ChatGPT users as of September. Worse yet, Google is far better positioned to turn generative AI into a viable business — all while minting a comfortable $30 billion in profit each quarter, as the Washington Post points out.” I agree with the setting the Washington Post sets out with and Google does have an advantage, but that is still relying on the fact that Sam Altman does not get his new version seen as stellar in the coming week. He still has a much larger issue, but that is for later. All this comes at the price of being in the frontrunner team. Easy does it, there is no other way and the stakes are set rather high. So then we are given “In a Thursday note, Deutsche Bank analyst Jim Reid estimated staggering losses for OpenAI amounting to $140 billion between 2024 and 2029.” This is probably true, but where are the numbers. $140 billion over 5 years is one, but what revenue is set against it? Because if this is still set against a revenue number that OpenAI keeps making they are going decently sweet, the numbers were never in debate, the return on investment was and these stakes are high and there is no debating that, these numbers are either given or they are not.
Then we are given something that makes sense ““OpenAI may continue to attract significant funding and could ultimately develop products that generate substantial profits and revolutionize the world,” he wrote, as quoted by WaPo. “But at present, no start-up in history has operated with expected losses on anything approaching this scale.” “We are firmly in uncharted territory,” Reid added.” I agree, in several ways, but the revenue is not given as such the real deal is absent. Consider YouTube, did anyone see the upside of a $1.65 billion acquisition 20 years ago? It now generates $36.1 billion in annual revenue (2024), Microsoft and OpenAI are banking on that same setting and Microsoft needs it to get a quality replacement for Clippy and they are banking on ChatGPT, this will only happen if they win over Google and I have my doubts on this. There is no real evidence because the new version isn’t ready yet, but it really needs one hitch to make it all burn down and Altman knows this. The numbers or better, the statistics are not on his side. And as I haven’t see a decent software price fight for a while, so I am keeping my thumbs up for Altman (I am however a through and through Google guy). This is a worthy fight watching and I am wondering how this might evolves over the next week.
The stakes are high, the challenge is high, lets see if Sam Altman rises to the occasion. It’s almost Sunday for me so have a great day you all, I reckon that Ryan Reynolds is about 6 hours from breakfast in Vancouver now.
Lawrence van Rijn - Law Lord to be 