It’s been a tough few months for OpenAI. The company received significant ethical and legal backlash after it emerged that ChatGate’s security guardrails were breached in some user conversations, which may have led to serious and sometimes fatal mental health events for some users.
At the time, OpenAI executives took some measures to make the chatbot safer for users, such as getting rid of some sycophantic language, which users claimed gave the chatbot more personality, introducing parental controls, prompting users in marathon conversations, and designing an age prediction system to automatically apply “age-appropriate settings” for minors.
But, according to a New York Times report last month, OpenAI executives announced a “code orange” in October (a step down from this week’s reported Code Red), saying that ChatGPT was facing intense competitive pressure, that the secure chatbot was not connecting with users, and outlining a goal for ChatGPT to increase daily active users by 5% by the end of the year.
Around the same time, OpenAI announced that they would be relaxing some of the previous restrictions around chatbot security by allowing chatbots to have more “personality” and incorporating “sexuality for verified adults”.
According to this week’s leaked memo, in the future ChatGPT users can expect increased speed and reliability in replies, more personalization, and a chatbot that is able to answer a wider range of questions. Nick Turley, head of ChatGPIT, reiterated parts of that statement in a post on X on Monday, saying that one of the company’s focus areas was to make the chatbot “feel even more intuitive and personal.”
OpenAI is also reportedly planning to release a new reasoning model next week. In the memo, Altman claims that the upcoming model outperforms Google’s latest release, Gemini 3, which received widespread praise and comparisons from ChatGPT when it launched last month. Many users, including Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, have claimed that Gemini 3 significantly outperforms ChatGPT.
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Altman’s turnaround effort will reportedly include temporary team relocations and delays to other initiatives the company is working on.
That is, OpenAI will advance its work on other ideas like AI agents for health and shopping and personal assistant Pulse, all features the company introduced just a few months ago.
They will also delay work on advertising initiatives, the Journal reports. OpenAI has yet to publicly acknowledge that initiative, but as The Information reports, the company is testing different types of ads in its chatbots. Even though Altman once described “advertising-plus-AI” as “uniquely untenable”, company executives have acknowledged considering the idea of an advertising business model for some time now, though no initiatives have been officially announced.
Last week, Tibor Blaho, engineer at In a post on X on Monday, Turley described the discovery as “one of the biggest areas of opportunity” in OpenAI.
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