Sam Altman warns staff as Google’s AI gains momentum in internal memo

In late November, someone inside OpenAI passed an internal note to a publication that matters to Silicon Valley. In the memo, CEO Sam Altman told employees what many in the industry were already whispering: Google’s latest advances in generative AI have shifted the landscape, and that shift could create “temporary economic headwinds” for OpenAI. But Altman’s message was equal parts caution and pep talk — the company, he wrote, is “catching up fast” and still aiming for the long game: superintelligence.

This is a familiar script right now: a smaller, fast-moving lab disrupted by an entrenched tech giant that suddenly ships something hard to ignore. But to understand why this memo landed with such force inside OpenAI, you have to read three storylines at once: the tech (what Google shipped), the business (how OpenAI’s growth looks right now), and the industrial strategy (why OpenAI is suddenly talking to manufacturers).

The tech shock: Gemini 3 arrives, and developers notice

Google’s Gemini 3 — billed by Google as its “most intelligent model” yet — rolled out across the company’s apps and developer platforms in mid-November. The update isn’t a small bump. Google positioned Gemini 3 with new agentic coding features, a developer-facing Antigravity IDE and benchmarks that, in some hands, make it feel like a different class of tool for building software and automating workflows. Early reactions from developer communities and partner vendors called out the model’s improvements on coding, reasoning and multi-step task execution. For teams that monetize code generation, that matters.

Inside OpenAI, sources say that kind of progress was seen not just as technical theater but as product and revenue pressure: if Gemini 3 can cleanly automate parts of website or product design and shipping, it threatens a lucrative slice of what companies — including OpenAI — sell to enterprises and developers.

The business picture: cooled engagement, exploding scale, and big burn

Altman didn’t write in a vacuum. Over the past months, OpenAI’s finance team has been flagging a subtle but important trend: user engagement with ChatGPT has softened. CFO Sarah Friar reportedly told investors that time spent with the chatbot had cooled, an input that matters for long-term monetization and product planning. At the same time, OpenAI is not a small, cash-starved startup — it now sits at the center of enormous economic bets: public estimates put its valuation near the half-trillion mark and revenue in the low double-digit billions this year, while analysts and public reporting point to eye-watering capital needs as the company scales compute, model training and data centers. Those financial contours help explain why Altman’s memo pairs blunt urgency with a call to focus on superintelligence.

Put plainly: the company is big enough that competition can dent growth, and ambitious enough that it needs a clear path to higher-margin product offerings — such as developer tools and enterprise code automation — to justify the bets.

“Wartime footing” and the forked mission

One of the more revealing lines in Altman’s note was a kind of existential shrug: OpenAI is being asked to be three companies at once — the best research lab, the best infrastructure company, and the best product/platform company — and that reality “sucks” but is the organization’s lot in life. That framing, whether you love it or hate it, explains a lot of the tactical moves OpenAI has made in recent months: buying access to scale, doubling down on engineering and also courting tighter commercial relationships. The internal memo urged employees to stay confident and keep their heads down on the long-term objective: the company’s research priorities, Altman argued, must aim toward superintelligence even as product teams patch and ship.

Industrial policy meets AI: the Foxconn move

If competition from Google means OpenAI needs to think harder about product velocity, the hardware reality means it must also think vertically. In a separate but related development, OpenAI announced a partnership with Foxconn to co-design and potentially manufacture AI data-centre components in the U.S. — a striking pairing of a frontier AI lab and the world’s biggest electronics contract manufacturer. OpenAI framed the deal as a national industrial opportunity to “reindustrialise America” for AI infrastructure; Foxconn emphasized its manufacturing scale and supply-chain capabilities. For OpenAI, the tie-up offers a way to control more of its stack and reduce dependence on third parties for servers and physical systems — a hedge against supply constraints and a bid to shorten the product cycle between research and deployment.

Why this matters

1. For customers and developers: better coding models from Google (and others) accelerate expectations. Enterprises will rapidly compare not just raw model scores but also how quickly a provider can plug into their CI/CD, IDEs, and service tooling. That’s a switch from “research win” to “product win.”
2. For OpenAI’s margins: productized developer tooling — code automation, agents that run workflows, platform integrations — is where commercial value concentrates. If engagement on general chat softens, revenue growth depends on deeper enterprise adoption.
3. For national strategy: manufacturing AI servers domestically doesn’t just shave supply timelines; it’s also a political and economic signal. OpenAI positioning part of its supply chain in U.S. facilities invites scrutiny, support and, potentially, policy incentives.

What to watch next

• OpenAI product cadence: Will OpenAI rush more agentic developer tools or a Codex-style offering to blunt Gemini’s coding lead?
• Enterprise benchmarks and contracts: Watch partners (GitHub, JetBrains, cloud providers) for details on who’s chosen which model for mission-critical coding workflows.
• Foxconn outputs: Keep an eye on announcements tied to specific server generations, and whether OpenAI buys Foxconn-made racks or licenses designs.

Altman’s memo is simultaneously a reality check and a rallying cry. Google shipped a product that raises the bar for developer tooling and integrated AI experiences; OpenAI recognizes the pressure and is both reorganizing internally and reaching outward — to manufacturers, to partners, to enterprise customers — to protect its lead. Whether catching up fast means racing to parity or sprinting past the competition will be decided not in memos but in code, contracts and the silicon racks humming in data centres. For now, the race feels closer than it did a year ago — and that’s exactly why a CEO felt the need to write a candid note to the troops.