OpenAI is racing to give ChatGPT a flashy upgrade after Google's Gemini 3 rattled CEO Sam Altman into "code red"

In August, OpenAI unveiled its long-anticipated GPT-5 model. However, the launch was rather underwhelming, with a large number of users expressing their disappointment and frustrations, indicating that it didn't meet their expectations and seemingly degraded ChatGPT's user experience.

Ever since then, the AI firm has seemingly been trying to play catch-up amid copyright infringement battles, cash flow issues, and its evolution into a for-profit venture with a new definitive agreement with Microsoft.

Google seemingly leveraged this opportunity to make its mark in the AI landscape through its new Gemini 3 model, which it refers to as "a new era of intelligence". The model ships with next-gen capabilities across reasoning, speed, images, and video.

Consequently, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman declared "code red" through an internal memo to employees amid rising competition from the likes of Google and Anthropic. Google's Gemini 3 AI model blew ChatGPT out of the water across a wide range of benchmark tests.

The model has also passed the vibe check for tech leaders like Salesforce's CEO Marc Benioff, who indicated that he was ditching ChatGPT after 3 years following his interaction with Google's new offering for just 2 hours.

But as it now seems, OpenAI might be getting ready to tip the scales back in its favour. The company will reportedly ship GPT-5.2 update as early as this week (via The Verge).

Perhaps more interestingly, the model ships with a wide range of improvements and capabilities that could potentially close the gap between Gemini 3 and ChatGPT.

An earlier report by The Information suggested that OpenAI's next reasoning model would be better than Gemini 3, according to internal evaluations. According to Tom Warren:

"I’m told that OpenAI was originally planning to launch GPT-5.2 later in December, but that the pressure from competitors has moved the release forward. Right now, OpenAI has earmarked December 9th for its GPT-5.2 release."

While GPT-5.2 is set to release on December 9, 2025, according to The Verge's report, launch dates can be subject to sudden changes due to a wide range of reasons, including development and server capacity issues.

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