According to Bloomberg, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s decision to sound a “red alert” at the company earlier this month may have caused industry concern, but this is not the first time for the AI company. Mark Chen, chief research officer of OpenAI, said that the company's management had previously sounded a "red alert" and clearly instructed employees to suspend low-priority tasks and focus on a single goal.
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"When we want to concentrate our efforts on a specific topic, we will take this measure." Chen Xinhan said in the interview.
OpenAI's latest "red alert" comes two weeks after Google released a critically acclaimed new AI model.The model outperforms OpenAI’s top models on multiple benchmarks. Then, OpenAI entered a state of emergency. Altman asked employees to reallocate internal resources to accelerate the improvement of ChatGPT and suspend the advancement of other projects such as self-driving AI agents and advertising.
"For me, this means focusing on the core products of chat, reasoning and ChatGPT to ensure that the most basic things are done well." Chen Xinhan said. This includes ensuring that chatbots run quickly and reliably.
Since sounding the "red alert", OpenAI has rolled out multiple updates to strengthen its flagship chatbot, including releasing a more advanced AI model, aiming to improve ChatGPT’s performance in programming, science, and various work tasks. The company also released a new image generation AI model that enables faster and higher-quality visual content generation.
Looking forward to 2026, Chen Xinhan said that his team will fully focus on researching algorithms, infrastructure and related technologies, which are the necessary foundation for OpenAI to train more powerful AI models. The company has committed $1.4 trillion over the next eight years to build infrastructure to support this goal.
“Everything else is really just an annoyance or a distraction,” he said.