Sam Altman, the CEO of AI firm OpenAI (PC:OPAIQ), recently warned employees that tech giant Google’s (GOOGL) progress in artificial intelligence could “create some temporary economic headwinds” for OpenAI. In a company memo last month, he admitted that Google had developed a new AI that may have temporarily pulled ahead of OpenAI’s own technology, according to The Information. Altman said, “We know we have some work to do,” and cautioned that public perception might be “rough for a bit.” His comments came in anticipation of Google’s Gemini 3 announcement this week.
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It’s worth noting that OpenAI is still a leader that’s valued at $500 billion, but rivals are gaining ground. Indeed, Anthropic (PC:ANTPQ), founded by former OpenAI employees, may generate more developer revenue than OpenAI this year. Google is also promoting its Gemini chatbot through products like Google Search, which is slowly closing the usage gap with ChatGPT. In addition, OpenAI’s spending plans aren’t helping it either, as the company expects to burn more than $100 billion in order to reach human-level AI and may need to raise significantly more money to keep going.
Altman also addressed technical challenges inside OpenAI. He praised Google’s recent success in pretraining (the first stage of building AI models) by calling it “excellent work.” That surprised many researchers because OpenAI has struggled with pretraining gains in larger models. To respond, OpenAI is now working on a new model called Shallotpeat that aims to fix these issues. Altman told employees that the company will focus on bold ideas like reinforcement learning and automating AI research itself, even if that means falling behind temporarily.
Is Google Stock a Good Buy?
Turning to Wall Street, analysts have a Strong Buy consensus rating on Google stock based on 31 Buys and seven Holds assigned in the past three months. Furthermore, the average Google price target of $312.00 per share implies 5.6% upside potential.
