Since 2022, OpenAI has been the primary character in the most interesting tech and business story in years. ChatGPT was early, and so was OpenAI’s fundraising. Its models were more capable than anything else people had access to, and each new one reshaped the discourse around generative AI in the company’s favor.

As 2025 comes to an end, other companies’ models have basically caught up; Google, Anthropic, and xAI have been handing popular AI benchmarks back and forth all year (including this week). They’ve also built comparable products, trying to lure software developers and casual users with long but similar lists of features and capabilities (search, deep research, image and video generation, memory, etc.), all while competing aggressively on price. Other firms have raised or committed huge amounts of money, and OpenAI has lost a lot of talent. In other words, the company most identified with the AI race — which now has enormous financial commitments and a lot to lose — is no longer running away with it. It has competition.

So without a clearly dominant model and a unique path to profitability and with fewer people convinced of your pitch that you’re the only company in the world capable of building the most valuable product in the world, what do you do? You start branching out, as is the case with Sora, a TikTok clone built on top of OpenAI’s video-generation tools that the company released earlier this year. This week, the company announced a partnership with Disney that would let users include “beloved characters” in their videos, adding some nostalgia brand-risk frisson to the viral (but flagging) slop-sharing platform.

You also double down on what’s already working back here in the dreary pre-future. As part of an internet “code red” declaration responding to Google’s momentum and Anthropic’s growth with enterprise customers, Altman instructed OpenAI to pause its various side projects, focus its goals, and get people using more ChatGPT. According to The Wall Street Journal:

The move was striking in part because one criticism of Altman’s leadership has been his reluctance to put limits on what the company can accomplish.

And it was telling that he instructed employees to boost ChatGPT in a specific way: through “better use of user........

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