Is OpenAI Falling Behind in the AI Arms-Race?

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I’ve recently noticed a bunch of YouTube videos with headlines and thumbnails claiming that other AI companies are making significant strides—new models, impressive developments, big moves—and interestingly, none of these videos have been about OpenAI.

I haven’t had a chance to dig deeply into this, and honestly, some of it could just be clickbait. Still, it caught my attention. I’d love to hear thoughts from people who closely follow the AI space. Is there truth to this, or is it mostly hype? Curious about everyone’s perspectives.

Nick

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Probably, depends on the strategy that is used, but some of the competition seems to have better strategies

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Nothing is certain in this field, one day a new model like OpenAI’s image model surges and boom it is king, the other day surges Google’s Veo 3 and it is another leap.

I think it is all becoming like comodities, what matter most is API scalability, clear data privacy policies, reasonable costs and to not fall too far behind in capabilities.

It is actually a good thing to not have a single leading provider.

One thing is to see one Youtube video of an amazing AI demo, the other is if it can deliver all these pointed notes. Many incredible AI products quickly shine and disappear for these reasons.

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Hey Nick,

Appreciate you bringing this up — quick Q just to understand better what you’re pointing to:

When you say “none of these videos have been about OpenAI,” do you mean in terms of coverage (like fewer demos/releases)? Or more like perception shifts — OpenAI being framed differently than before?

Also curious what kind of “strides” you’ve noticed from others — Veo 3, Gemini 1.5, Claude Sonnet etc? Just trying to get a feel for which developments triggered this reflection.

Thanks again for sparking the thread.

– T

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I think OpenAI has gotten cozy with their #1 position. Companies often forget what got them to the place they’re in, and then they start to slow down only to be dwarfed by everyone else. Their recent executive hire is a good tell that this is starting to happen.

If OpenAI can’t stay competitive, they will be eaten up by every other major player. The issues with sycophancy, API bugs and continuity issues, expiring credits, all of these give a bad rep and push customers towards more reliable competitors.

They’re 100% falling behind. It’s how they respond that matters most of all.

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Absolutely. Veo3 and Gemini really showed the world what Google has been cooking - and they’re not stopping. They have deep pockets, legally owned human-generated content, and few string attached to their funding.

The current leader of OpenAI is chasing unicorns towards a dystopian future.

I use Gemini for coding now. The family plan is affordable and seamless so my family can all enjoy a centralized Gemini. Once they begin tying it all into their smart home technologies it’s game over.

We’ll see though. Whatever this “screenless” device is could revolutionize the world. My hopes aren’t high. The enshittification of LLMs will be horrible. OpenAI has a lot of promises to fulfill to the big corporations and investors.

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Hi Nick,

As someone who follows AI development closely, I have to say that the concerns you raised are valid. In my opinion, OpenAI is indeed starting to fall behind in certain aspects—especially when compared to how quickly competitors are iterating and launching genuinely useful features.

A concrete example is Perplexity’s introduction of Deep Research in their Labs. With this feature, users can set a topic, and the AI will spend up to nine minutes gathering, analyzing, and synthesizing information—essentially providing a deep-dive report. It’s a powerful, productivity-oriented tool that’s pushing the boundary of what AI assistants can do.

Meanwhile, OpenAI has made some questionable product decisions. For instance, they removed the indicator that let users know how many Deep Research tasks they’d used, and there’s still no unlimited Deep Research mode. This lack of transparency and capped access stands in stark contrast to Perplexity’s rapid progress and more open approach.

If OpenAI doesn’t accelerate its pace or respond with more user-focused, innovative features, I genuinely think it’s going to be left behind—at least from the perspective of power users and people looking for advanced, research-driven AI.

Curious to see what others think!

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how are they going to accelerate the pace when they have the lion’s share of users bogging down the servers?

what will be will be.

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My pleasure,

I will be completely transparent—as I said, i’m really not caught up on the current AI benchmarks and competition, but my yotube algorthim loves to throw “AI News” at me. I never watch the videos but usualy the titles say “GOOGLE JUST DID THIS… END OF OPEN AI?” sometomes its not google but most of the time it is if I remember correctly.

Three more things made me post this:

Firstly, I had a conversation with one of my old professors about AI and he was trying to say Deep Seek is better than ChatGPT, and he was saying this with strong conviction. I responded to him by saying something like, “I highly doubt that but i’m not up-to-date on benchmarks and stuff”, is there truth to this or objectively not true or hard to say for sure?

Secondly, my buddy who enjoys AI sent me something that he seemed really impressed with. I still haven’t tried using it yet—but he sent me what you mentioned— “Veo 3.” Not sure why he was so excited about this, but from his excitement it must be a pretty big deal. Going to look into this at some point.

Lastly, I have been using something called Manus.AI, not sure if anyone here is familiar, I just found out about this recently, and man oh man, it BLOWWWSSSSSSSS operator away (sorry OpenAI, still love you guys, but its true.) Full transparency—I asked operator to fill out my End of Semester class evaluations for me, and it acted like i was trying to get it to solve the information paradox :joy:. To make a long story short, it finally did it and I was so excited at the time, but I had to help it out a lot—a lot of spoon feeding. One month later I got introduced to Bolt (it built the entire front end of a website for me) and Manus (built even more) and quickly felt, its not even a close competition right now, different league of AI.

TLDR: Using Bolt and Manus really brought me to ask this question on this forum, because I wanted to get the true consensus from people who are more well-versed in the field than I am.

Sorry if that was long winded. Thank you for your interest in this topic.

Nick

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They do tend to do this. But this is the first time OpenAI has been bested by multiple competitors and doesn’t have better technology on standby to release in response.

It reminds me very much of how AMD got ahead of Intel, and Intel has been going downhill for the past decade. OpenAI needs to start becoming competitive and learn from history in this regard.

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I appreciate the response, I just figured they were fighting an uphill battle from the beginning and its just a matter of time before that weight fully manifests itself. What I mean by that is, companies like google and facebook have its fingers in so many different things tech related, not to mention both their current cashflows. Maybe theres more to the story that I’m not considering but it just feels like, its only a matter of time.

Here is what im talking about, this is from o3:

" * Alphabet and Meta each throw >$50 B/yr from ads into AI infra without jeopardizing dividends or buy-backs. OpenAI, even with Microsoft’s backing, generated just ~$3.7 B revenue and remained loss-making in 2024."

So with that said, is this a fair fight?

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I think so. It’s basically a Microsoft subsidiary at this point with how much they’ve invested into OpenAI. And OpenAI is investing even more by getting involved in this IO stuff. So money isn’t exactly an issue here.

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Thank you for the insight. I haven’t heard of Perplexity yet, but thats the benefit of this forum topic—now I have.

You mentioned that Perplexity has a Deep Research. Objectively—do you think its on par with OpenAIs/ChatGPTs Deep Research with limits and cost not being a factor (Raw power and full capacity specifically)?

I wholeheartedly agree with you about OpenAI’s transparancy. To be honest, I just thought the Deep Research not showing how many you have left was just some bug, but you said they purposefully removed it, if true, thats pretty crazy since as I understand it, there is a hard set limit that you pay for based on your subscription.

Please feel free to share more. Thanks again.

Nick

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Hello,

Can you please elaborate a bit more, I am curious to hear more on your point.

Nick

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Thank you for the insight. I figured someone would bring up Microsoft, but thats definitely a more than fair point.

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Hello,
Your question is ‘Is OpenAI Falling behind in the AI Arms-Race?’

In a sense of your question from my thinking to answer, my argument shall/would be 'Both Yes or No. OpenAI isn’t falling behind in the AI Arms-Race. It’s true that OpenAI faces strong competition from other companies that are ahead in certain areas like features, performance, or model reliability.

But, by far. OpenAI struggles to deliver stable models, and bug issues can be seen more often. I’ll not deny that other companies, don’t face these types of issues. Except, it falls behind in Performance, Features, and Context with Memories.

  • For example, some users have noted latency and context-handling issues in longer threads or shorter threads, while other models offer persistent memory or smoother UI performance.

Other than that, it’s completely fine and is not falling behind.

Ultimately, the answer isn’t a simple yes or no. Unless OpenAI becomes consistently unreliable in its performance and processing, that may hinder the user base to not comply with.

While, I did not give out the explanation of inquiry. I hope, it’d help you to understand as why these peoples, tends to make huge impression toward these AIs, until they eventually shift to another model. They’re doing this for their own desire and motives, as example for Money can be interpreted as common source, or Sponsorship.
They also have other reasons to promote, as it can be to introduce the community to better AIs to guide them, and gave the road to feel a new thinking. or to state the problems with OpenAI either other competitors

That’s all, I’ve to say for now. I hope this reply helps, answering your inquiry.

With Regards,
Aurelis

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Aurelis,

Thank you so much for the thoughtful response. I have been doing some research of my own and I think I figured out what my question really is. Let me explain.

For the past 2 years the extent of my experience with AI has been me talking to ChatGPT exclusively, and its always been such a helpful tool and game changing tool. Over the past 3 months I decided to invest some time into getting more granular, learning more about AI, etc. I signed up for OpenAIs API etc. This showed me that there is so much more to leverage than just ChatGPT, so i kept going.

Last week I tried this thing called Bolt.new and it literally built a full website for me with one prompt—my mind was blown—ChatGPT would never be able to do this.

That is essentially the root of my question. OpenAI, Google, etc have billions of dollars but some random startup just blew both of them away. For someone who doesnt know how to build a website, this was huge for me—but maybe if you already know how to build one, you would be less impressed by Bolt.new.

I asked ChatGPT to explain how this is possible and basically the TLDR is, narrow scope makes things more useful and also “focus breeds data advantage.”

I say that all to say, I really like where this is heading even though I really don’t fully understand it. I never got a formal Computer Science education and having an AI that fills those knowledge and skill gaps is invaluable to me.

I definitely want to know about more “narrow scope” AI providers if anyone has found other cool ones. Right now, all I know about is Bolt.new and Manus.AI and leveraging them has been so useful.

Nick

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That’s great. For a beginner, that essentially does not know ‘How to make a Website’. It’s actually very useful to use Bolt.new as to create a full website. Regarding about this “narrow scope”. There might be more of them and I kind of lack social awareness as I tend to miss details from the surroundings to get the latest update on AI’s. Good for you..!

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From 2020 to 2023, OpenAI was clearly the front-runner in the AI race.
They set not only technical benchmarks for the industry, but also shaped what users came to expect from AI.
Naturally, whenever another company announces “We can now do what wasn’t possible before,” it makes headlines—even if it’s just one specific capability. That’s fair, and in many cases, it’s true. But claiming a full-spectrum lead over OpenAI? That still seems questionable.

OpenAI now faces a tougher challenge: improving without a clear target ahead. In contrast, competitors benefit from having OpenAI as a reference point when designing their models—which is a significant advantage.

If OpenAI eventually loses its position as the baseline for comparison, the real battle might just begin. That said, maintaining momentum without outside funding could be difficult.

For now, ChatGPT seems designed with a strong focus on balance and user interaction. But moving forward, OpenAI may need to explore sharper specialization. If they do, they’ll likely need a strong, visionary leader to guide that transition.

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OpenAI’s codex cli with o3 model just implemented the complete frontend for my video translation platform. It is AMAZING!! ChatGPT is not for coding, so don’t use it for coding.

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