The undisputed dominance of OpenAI’s ChatGPT is now facing an existential threat, prompting CEO Sam Altman to reportedly declare an internal “code red” on Monday.

This emergency directive instructs the company to immediately halt numerous forward-looking initiatives and pivot all resources toward aggressively improving the performance and reliability of its flagship conversational product. The dramatic decision acknowledges that the startup’s once-unassailable lead in the generative AI race is rapidly eroding under intense competitive pressure from rivals, most notably Google and Anthropic.

The severity of the situation is reflected in the designation, which elevates the crisis beyond the previous “code orange” level. The need for decisive action comes as OpenAI spends billions annually on compute costs and talent, facing the dual pressures of intense technological competition and the need to achieve a highly ambitious, long-term profitability target.

In the internal memo, reported by The Wall Street Journal and The Information, Altman mandated that the pursuit of new revenue streams and applications must be temporarily sacrificed to focus on product stabilization. This strategic shift involves putting on hold several high-profile projects, such as:

• Monetization and Growth Initiatives: Development of integral monetization features, including the integration of advertisements (ads) within ChatGPT and the deployment of advanced AI-powered shopping features, has been delayed.
• Specialized AI Agents: The rollout of complex AI applications like health agents and the highly anticipated ChatGPT Pulse personal assistant has also been put on the back burner.

Instead, the company’s daily focus will now be entirely on core product refinement. Altman instituted a daily call for staff tasked with development and encouraged temporary team transfers to accelerate the work on essential features.

The focus areas are explicit: achieving greater speed and reliability, delivering better personalization, and enhancing the model’s broader question-answering capabilities through improved knowledge and reasoning.

The Competitive Threat of Gemini’s Surge and Structural Advantages

The urgency of the “code red” is directly attributable to the aggressive technological and market penetration achieved by competitors, completing a sharp role reversal from late 2022 when Google was forced into its own “code red” by ChatGPT’s arrival.

Altman congratulated Google last month, following the release of Gemini 3.

“Congrats to Google on Gemini 3! Looks like a great model,” he said.

The primary factors threatening OpenAI’s position are:

• Gemini 3’s Benchmark Dominance: Google’s latest model, Gemini 3 Pro, has leveraged its unique research strengths to achieve superior performance across critical benchmarks. It has surpassed OpenAI’s current GPT-5 model on several industry-standard tests, particularly those assessing complex reasoning tasks, visual interpretation, and multimodality. Gemini 3’s groundbreaking 1-million-token context window also provides a strategic advantage, allowing corporate clients and developers to process and reason over massive, previously unmanageable documents and codebases.
• Explosive User Base Growth: While OpenAI retains a large user base (reportedly 800 million weekly users), Google’s AI user base has seen explosive growth. Web analytics show users now spend more time with the Gemini interface, and the MAUs have surged from 450 million in July to 650 million in October. A major contributor to this growth was the viral success of the Nano Banana image generation and editing model (officially Gemini 2.5 Flash Image), which attracted over 10 million new users to the Gemini app and facilitated over 200 million image edits within weeks of its launch.
• Structural Cost Disadvantage: OpenAI operates at a structural disadvantage compared to Google. Google controls the “full stack,” including its own specialized TPU chips for cheap training and deployment, its Google Cloud infrastructure, and seamless integration across Search, Android (3 billion devices), and Workspace. Conversely, OpenAI relies on Microsoft’s cloud and expensive Nvidia chips, creating a higher operational cost base that makes it difficult to sustainably challenge rivals on pricing or achieve long-term profitability.

The pressure is further compounded by Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.5 model, which consistently rivals or exceeds the performance of OpenAI’s current model in key tests. Altman has reportedly sought to reassure employees that a new reasoning model is in the pipeline, which he believes will surpass Gemini 3’s capabilities, but the immediate “code red” suggests the company cannot afford to wait for that next-generation model to arrive.

In wrapping up my three-part GIN Therapy series, I turn to Tobacco – and its marketing in the Global South.

Only recently, I published an article “Cutting Loose or Losing (Tobacco) Control over Loosies,” in Woxsen Insights – the in-house magazine/ newsletter/ blogsite of the Woxsen University Hyderabad (India) – where I opined that the term “loosies” in this case study specifically refers to single cigarettes sold individually and outside of standard packaging – often as a means to sidestep tax laws and regulations. Interestingly, the term also carries other meanings, such as non-album musical tracks released individually by artists, or more colloquially, any single loose cigarette sold at retail level.

This practice is not unique to Africa – loosies permeate markets in the Global South and the GIN (Ghana, India, Nigeria) discussed illustrate only part of the bigger picture. Oceania, for example, leads the pack (in percentage terms) in tobacco consumption, but African countries probably trumps that when it comes to the headcount (due to having larger populations).

Starting with Ghana, although the has ratified the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) and became a party to the Protocol to Eliminate Illicit Trade in Tobacco Products in 2021, there is a need to fully implement these international commitments, especially the protocol on illicit trade. In a recent article “The trade of illicit cigarettes in Ghana,” published in Tobacco Prevention & Cessation, it was pointed out that “Ghana has made important strides in tobacco control: the implementation of an early advertising ban (1982), the passage of the Tobacco Control Act (in 2012), the prohibition of single-stick sales (2017), the implementation of graphic health warnings (2018), provision of tax stamps on tobacco products (2018), and, more recently, the ratification of the ITP (2021) and a review of tobacco taxes”. The study went on to highlight that single stick sales continue to be rampant in Ghana, and cigarettes remain accessible and inexpensive (< US$1 per pack), with total excise taxes on tobacco products in Ghana accounting for only 31.8% of the average retail price.

An earlier study, “Landscape of tobacco control in sub-Saharan Africa,” mentions that Ghana’s tobacco regulation includes the Public Health Act of 2012 and the 2017 Tobacco Control Regulations, which prohibit smoking in public places, ban tobacco advertising, promotion, and sponsorship (TAPS), and mandate graphic health warnings on packaging. With all the regulations including the Public Health Act 2012 and the prohibition on the sale of single sticks and a ban on sales to minors, challenges remain due to issues like inadequate resources for enforcement, the prevalence of illicit trade, and the continued sale of individual cigarettes. Three ‘i’s stood out – Inconsistent enforcement, Industry interference, and Illicit trade – leading to a fourth “i” – implementation challenges.

In terms of inconsistent enforcement, regulations like the ban on single-stick sales are not consistently enforced, and designated smoking areas are still common in public spaces. When it comes to industry interference, there is concern about the tobacco industry’s interference in policy development, as the code of conduct to protect public health policy from industry influence has not been issued. Finally, the illicit trade of tobacco remains a significant problem, exacerbated by porous borders and a lack of effective enforcement.

Moving on to India, loosies are also common, with single sticks priced between ?15 ($0.17) and ?25 ($0.28). Besides the prevalence of loosies – there’s another uphill battle that still requires a fix (literally speaking) – paan masala – It’s complicated as “paan masala may or may not contain tobacco,” but when it does, it is considered a tobacco product. While pure pan masala is a mixture of ingredients like areca nut, lime, and spices, many versions also include a complimentary pouch of chewing tobacco, and products like “gutkha” are a blend of pan masala with tobacco. Tobacco-containing pan masala is a harmful and potentially carcinogenic smokeless tobacco product. As the following article  “Social Determinants and the Prevalence of Paan Masala Use among Adults in India” from the  2016-17 PubMed Central (PMC) “Global Adult Tobacco Survey” reveals, the battle is hardly won against Big Tobacco.

As for Nigeria, this context was captured in my article “Loosies”! Has Africa Lost the War on Big Tobacco?, and an earlier wider 2-part study examining the regulatory hurdles and public policy implications of ongoing regulatory breaches by “Big Tobacco” in Africa – from the ‘outright sale’ of single cigarettes (“loosies”) to ‘outright bans’ on smoking in public places, advertising regulations to plain packaging initiatives.

In the first study “Consumer Protection in Sub-Saharan Africa: An Exploration of “Big Tobacco” Marketing Practices in 2016, I explored how tobacco marketers used Sub-Saharan Africa as a testbed for “guerrilla marketing” strategies, exploiting weak consumer protection laws that were already well established elsewhere. In my follow-on study three years later in 2019, “Regulatory Challenges in Sub-Saharan Africa and Marketing Malpractices of “Big” Tobacco,” I went a step further to review regulatory practices in Nigeria alongside other African countries – Malawi and Mauritius. That study revealed that while policies to protect vulnerable groups from harmful products exist, enforcement had been – and is still – inconsistent at best. For example, although selling single cigarettes is illegal in much of the world, the practice remains widespread across African markets, particularly in the three countries examined.

In that article, I also highlighted how tobacco companies frequently partnered with governments in joint marketing initiatives – from publicity and sponsorship efforts that not only glamorized smoking, but also projected it as “cool.” Evidently the economic stakes further complicate matters – In Malawi, for example, tobacco contributes about 50 percent of the country’s total foreign currency earnings and 15 percent of GDP – making it politically and economically – difficult to penalize “Big Tobacco” for regulatory breaches.

Let’s face it, Tobacco Regulation in the Global South is not just a public health and social issue, but also one of marketing – social, strategic or sustainable marketing – that requires further research interrogation especially where there are real or perceived power asymmetry – “Global North” versus “Global South”, and between tobacco production and consumption.

This article ultimately speaks to both SDG3 (good health and wellbeing) and SDG12 (sustainable production and consumption) – it is all going up in smoke it seems.