According to The Wall Street Journal, Altman stated that the AI giant must boost its flagship model’s personalisation, speed, reliability and expand its coverage of different topics.

The move for the internal emergency is not just internal pressure; it’s external competition, as since launch in December 2022, competitors including Google, Anthropic, Meta and DeepSeek have emerged as strong challengers. 

Despite setbacks, OpenAI is expected to release a new model next week aimed at competing with Google’s latest Gemini version. 

The WSJ also reported that its last major release, GPT-5, launched in August 2025, received mixed reviews, with users saying it felt clinical and performed worse in math and geography than earlier models.

This comes as Altman recently warned that the fast growth and widespread use of AI is putting heavy strain on computing power and energy resources.

Emphasising that the tool is no longer just a novelty, the CEO of the AI giant, added: “What we’re hearing again and again in all these different ways is that these tools have gone from things that were fun and curious, to like truly useful in personal lives,” he said. “

“The fact that you can now, like, ask a system to go off and do some work for you autonomously is pretty remarkable.”

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