OpenAI’s huge early lead in the race to dom­in­ate arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence is under the greatest pres­sure since Chat­GPT’s launch, as rivals Google and Anthropic gain ground in the cut­ting-edge sec­tor.

Three years on from the debut of its pop­u­lar chat­bot, the $500bn start-up is grap­pling with the real­ity of soar­ing data centre costs, the tech­nical chal­lenges of remain­ing at the fron­tier of AI and the con­stant battle to retain tal­ent.

It is also facing a resur­gent Google, with the release last month of Gem­ini 3, Google’s latest large lan­guage model, which is con­sidered to have leapfrogged OpenAI’s GPT-5 and achieved gains from the model train­ing pro­cess that have eluded OpenAI in recent months.

“It’s quite a strong dif­fer­ence with the world we had two years ago where OpenAI was lead­ing ahead of every­one else,” said Thomas Wolf, co-founder and chief sci­ence officer of open-source start-up Hug­ging Face. “It’s a new world.”