The rapid creation and development of Google's Gemini has set off alarms for OpenAI and has led many experts to think that the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, has been placed in panic mode by Demis Hassabis, the head of AI for Google.

That would be crazy if it was true, but Hassabis himself was the one who hinted at that on Twitter when he tweeted, "Sam Altman and OpenAI are in a Code Red."

Let's look at some data from December 2025. ChatGPT's usage saw a sharp decline at that point with the total number of visits dropping from 203 million/week to 158 million/week (a 22% drop). By the beginning of January 2026, ChatGPT also saw its market share decrease from 68% to 64.5%. At the same time, however, Gemini saw astonishing growth of approximately 28% month-over-month and claimed a 21.5% market share for generative artificial intelligence (up from 5.7% one year earlier) and had captured nearly 40% of the total audience that ChatGPT had attracted.

In Altman's internal memo to OpenAI after Google launched its Gemini (version 3.0), he wrote, "Code Red!" He continued with a call for everyone within OpenAI to stop focusing on advertisements, shopping assistants, health agents, and the newly released Pulse assistant. Instead, he requested that everyone, "first fix ChatGPT." He indicated that a critical time had now arrived.

Hassabis (and therefore Google) have been aggressive in touting the success of their Gemini. To quote Hassabis' recent tweet, "Much more hard work to do... but we continue to make a lot of progress."