Hey there,

Remember TiVo?

The company revolutionized television and its innovations eventually led to online streaming, now the ubiquitous way we watch movies and TV. My son doesn't even understand what it means to "watch a TV channel" that's only broadcasting one thing at a time.

TiVo was revolutionary, but ultimately forgotten. And the same thing is happening to OpenAI.

OpenAI's ChatGPT is the most well-known brand in AI right now – and one of the most recognizable brands in the world.

But, on the cutting edge, OpenAI is falling behind its two biggest competitors, Google's Gemini and Anthropic's Claude. In fact, as of this week, if you are so inclined, you can finally get the same quality of output using only Gemini and Claude and eliminating OpenAI from your toolkit.

Today I'll show you the two big factors behind this major shift.

Factor 1 →
Model Quality: Claude + Gemini can now do it all

Literally two weeks ago I said this to my students in the AI Executive System program, where we teach how to build customized AI agents for your life and career:

Then Google launched Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite and changed the AI agent game.

Flash-Lite costs less than GPT-5 Mini and is way better. While you won't use it directly if you're just chatting with your favorite AI model via its normal interface, this is a big deal for anyone building larger AI workflows.

For example, I have an agent that processes about 100,000 words of content and then gives me a summary. In the past I had to combine GPT-5 Mini (to do the 100K token analysis and first draft) and then bring in Claude Haiku 4.5 to rewrite the report, since GPT-5 Mini's writing was not very good.

Previously, that workflow took 40 seconds and cost $0.05. With Gemini Flash-Lite doing all the work, it takes 5 seconds and costs $0.003. That is 16x cheaper and 8x faster, and Gemini Flash-Lite writes the report just as well as Claude Haiku for this use case.

In other words, the last scenario where I had to use OpenAI's models is now gone, because Gemini provides higher quality at lower cost.

So Gemini now has a very strong "low-end / workhorse" model and Claude continues to be excellent on "high-end" tasks like writing and coding. While you can still use OpenAI for these tasks and get great results, it is no longer the case that OpenAI has a one-of-a-kind offering.

Factor 2 →
Company Trust: Everyone already trusts Google

Anthropic has earned a ton of goodwill recently by standing up to the Pentagon about the use of its AI tools for military purposes. (Even though I think the practical effect of Anthropic's limits is probably overblown, Anthropic is undoubtedly better about AI ethics than OpenAI.)

The result is that folks who know the Anthropic and Claude brands generally view them as trustworthy. However, most people didn't know those brand names until very recently.

By contrast, everyone on the planet already knows the Google brand, and it has an extremely high level of trust attached to it.

I store almost all of my critical data in clouds owned by Google – Gmail, Google Drive, Google Sheets / Docs, and so on. I use the Chrome browser. My son does all his schoolwork on a Chromebook. This does not worry me at all. Trust in Google is ubiquitous, both at the consumer level and the enterprise level.

Two years ago the most common question I got from students was whether they can trust OpenAI with their data. (The verdict: kinda sorta.) This is because OpenAI was new but also because they already had a reputation for playing fast and loose with copyright and privacy.

In Google, OpenAI has a major competitor with very good AI models, universal name recognition and extremely high trust.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has made the trust gap even worse by adopting a public persona that I would describe as "Elon Musk Lite" – hyper-capitalist, low-empathy, and generally dismissive of AI safety and ethics.

The end of OpenAI?

Imagine you have to convince another person why they should use OpenAI over the combination of Gemini and Claude. What argument would you make?

Now that model quality is the same and the trust gap is so glaring, I have a very hard time making the case for OpenAI.

The company will still go public this year and make a ton of money. But their first-mover advantage is gone. They will always be known for the world-changing innovation that was ChatGPT, but now that bigger players and scrappier upstarts are producing AI models of equal or better quality, the next few years may see OpenAI fading into the sunset, TiVo-style.

Until next time,

– Rob
CEO of Innovating with AI

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