If you thought 2024 was a big year for OpenAI, 2025 might surprise you. The ChatGPT maker ended the year on a high note with “12-day shipping.” Several products and services were announced there, including new features. A paid subscription plan called ChatGPT Pro costs $200 per month. The AI company has also shipped its o1 inference model widely available, and rumors have reached windmills suggesting that the model constitutes AGI.
A previous report by Mashable indicated that OpenAI’s 12-day extravaganza Shipmas event was a strategic move designed to make chatbots the “Everything app.” Although OpenAI has not explicitly acknowledged this claim, its recent moves are strategic and ultimately turn the platform into a one-stop shop for the average user.
OpenAI is probably the most popular chatbot, especially among mobile users, with the most downloads, installs, and revenue compared to rivals like Microsoft Copilot and Gemini. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella claimed that OpenAI’s success in the AI space is due to its two-year lead in the field and its ability to build and develop ChatGPT without competition.
Nadella is not the only top executive concerned about OpenAI’s rapid progress in the AI field. According to a report from CNBC, Google CEO Sundar Pichai recently held a meeting with employees to discuss the company’s 2025 focus and goals. As you might expect, the conversation centered around AI.
“The stakes are high,” Pichai said. “In 2025, we must relentlessly focus on maximizing the benefits of this technology and solving real problems for our users.” Google remains the top go-to search engine for most users. However, the rapid emergence of AI-powered alternative search engines is tipping the scale.
Google’s CEO acknowledged that OpenAI’s ChatGPT is rapidly gaining traction while responding to comments suggesting that ChatGPT is becoming synonymous with AI, much like Google’s search. More interestingly, the executive said that “Gemini’s expansion on the consumer side will be our biggest focus next year,” hinting that it may counter OpenAI’s threat to its dominant search market share. That’s what I did.
During the conference, Pichai shared a graph showing Gemini 1.5’s significant lead compared to competitors in the space, including OpenAI’s GPT. But he acknowledged there could be competition for the top spot. Although the business environment is expected to be competitive, the executive insisted, “I think we’ll be at the cutting edge.”
You don’t always have to be first in history, but you have to execute well and be truly best-in-class as a product. I think that will be in 2025.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai
Last year, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said Google had all the potential and resources to become an AI leader, but it failed. Repeated statements inspired Google’s CEO to launch deadly attacks on Microsoft.
“We always want to do side-by-side comparisons of Microsoft’s own models and ours. Microsoft uses other companies’ models.”
In 2025, Google may establish itself in the AI space, but its approach may be a bit unconventional. The CEO wants the company to return to its old mode of operation, centered around building and shipping faster. He acknowledged that this approach is crude, but could offer some benefits.
“If you look at how the founders built our data centers in the early days of Google, they were really careful about any decisions they made. In many cases, the constraints were It leads to creativity. Not all problems are always solved by headcount.”
A former Google engineer says the company may have a better chance with OpenAI’s “temporary prototype” search tool (SearchGPT) than with an antitrust ruling that deemed the company’s search engine an illegal monopolist in the field. I warned him that he couldn’t do it.
Things may have gotten even more complicated after OpenAI shipped ChatGPT Search, a fine-tuned version of GPT-4o that was post-trained using new synthetic data generation techniques. Please note that the AI-powered search tool is limited to ChatGPT Plus and Teams users, so you will need a $20 monthly subscription to access that feature.
