AI Showdown: OpenAI vs. Google Gemini

Jaden, I love the drama behind all these sort of like, I don't call them model battles. People sort of get mad at me when I do. But our family just watched the Lord of the Rings trilogy over Thanksgiving. And it reminds me of that because Sam Altman has declared a code red at OpenAI. And it's so cool. And he's basically like marshalling all his resources like in the two towers when all the armies come together to improve ChatGPT. because Gemini, I don't want to say caught everybody off guard, but holy cow, Google Gemini and holy cow, Claude, right? I mean, like Claude 4.5 Opus is, I'm not sure that's not the best of the bunch. Like it's unbelievable. I use those all the time, which is, all this is funny because Google declared their own code red. Remember this one? Like Chad G.B.T. launched, they're like, what is this right now? And then Google spent 2023 stumbling, sort of started to get together halfway through 2024, fall 2024, got it back together. But all these models, guys, I will just say that I'm constantly testing. And, Jaden, before the year's out, you and I have to do an episode on our top tools. But, guys, I'm constantly testing ChatGPT 5.1 versus Google Gemini versus Cloud Opus, not to sort of see which is best, but just to get different answers and have to play off each other. And the absolute best way I've done this is with AIbox.ai. Guys, $19 a month. So just to give you a sense, I spend $250 or $200 a month or whatever on ChatGPT. I spend $100 on Claude because I run out of tokens. Otherwise, I spend on Gemini. I spend on Perplexity. $19 a month I'm also spending because AI Box 8i lets you do exactly what I'm toggling between tabs doing, which is compare answers side by side. It's absolutely unbelievable. It is the thing that people should be doing right now. I'm telling you. I'm not just saying that because I love Jaden and I love his products. This is unbelievable. And that's not even to speak about the workflows that you can build inside that same product. It's an amazing product. ai box said ai jaden you and i hear sort of like we're talking offline a bit about this code red and sort of laughing about it is the wrong word but like chad gpt is dropping everything what were your sort of like uh thoughts when you read this i think the first thing that's important to know well the first thing important is important to ask is um did you watch all three lord of the rings movies we got into the third but you know what the problem is we downloaded the an extended version of the return of the king that's four and a half hours it's like four and have hours that was thanks it was unbelievable anyway wow that's impressive that that is ambitious okay that was the first important question the other thing that i have to say that is hilarious is if you go on to like the independent they have like a big image on the top of their news article about this and it's like sam altman and like almost like he's in tears he's like ragged there's lightning in the sky opening eyes logo is cracked and on fire it's just i love the drama it's hilarious but i do think something that's really important to look at and i know people often talk about benchmarks, like they're not that important. They're like all these benchmarks, people are gaming them. I actually think the benchmarks are important. And there's a couple benchmarks that I think are especially important because they give people blind A-B test of models and it's literally what users prefer. And so I do think that those are really good insight. Now, if we go over to, I think probably the best benchmark platform, it's called artificial analysis. It covers like, it brings in all the other, it brings all the benchmarks together kind of and consolidates and shows them. So that's why I like using that tool in particular. No affiliation. I just like it. If you look at it right now, they have the intelligence benchmark with Gemini is beating OpenAI, but I think it gets worse than that. Gemini 3 is at 73 on intelligence. LOD's new Opus 4.5 that just dropped is at 70 and GPT-5 is at 70 as well. So basically we have and I think XAI is at like 65 So it a little bit behind there But I think what really interesting here is like not only are they falling quote unquote behind Anthropic or it seems like oh no Anthropic is like the same intelligence level Gemini is ahead of them. And even as they're kind of releasing these incremental updates like GPT 5.1, they're still behind Gemini 3. And so I think it's not a good, it's really not a good look. as far as speed goes yes they're a little bit faster than gemini as far as price goes gemini is a little bit more expensive than them um they're optimized cheaper than um on it and grok and um opus so like they're cheaper than a lot of the main models and um they are a little bit faster and those are amazing things but as far as intelligence goes i think a lot of times people will excuse like a few milliseconds of speed and a little bit of cost because honestly, we're all paying $20 a month. So we don't actually really think about the cost that much. When you look at the cost, it's usually API cost that developers are paying. So I don't think most of us ever think about the cost of our model. We're just going to pay $20 a month and use it. We don't really get rate limited very often. So I think a lot of those things don't matter. All the people care about is how good of a response does it give? And right now, Gemini is winning. And there's another problem that I think OpenAI has right now, which is that Google has access to your Gmail and your YouTube and your Google Docs and like basically all of the software you use to run your business, unless you're running through Microsoft's world, which I know that's a lot of people, but a lot of people run through Google as well. And even for personal, a lot of people use Google. Google has a lot of these assets that are like basically a competitive advantage in and of themselves that I think would make meta drool, right? Meta is trying to do their meta AI. They got your Facebook and your WhatsApp, but I mean, how much of your life is on Facebook and WhatsApp? Probably a smaller percentage than all of the Google properties. So Google has a massive competitive advantage there because they have your data. They can personalize your responses based off of your data, and they are doing that. And so not only do they have this intense impersonalization improvement, but if just the raw intelligence is higher, I think OpenAI is in for a, is like a double whammy. Like they have to be significantly smarter to make up for not having all of that personalized data that Google has. And I think right now, yeah, they're struggling. They really got to keep up. It's, it really begs the question of what, like it depends on what you're concerned with, right? So, so every time I see how much money OpenAI is spending, I'm like, gosh, how are they going to make this back? Because I see the model for Google, right? Cloud. I see the model even for Amazon cloud. I see the model for Microsoft cloud and enterprise sales. I'm just not sure. I mean, ChatGPT is phenomenal. And I think that most of the world is just still defaulting. I think ChatGPT's numbers are the most accurate of anybody's numbers. Like, I mean, Gemini says, oh, this many people using this and Meta says this many. And they're always like 600 million. Yeah. But that sort of also counts if you're just doing search and things like that, right? So that's not really people using Gemini or people using Meta. But ChatGPT, there's only one thing you do at ChatGPT. You come on there and you ask it a question as you would with an AI chatbot. So in that case, I think ChatGPT is ahead. It'll probably always be like ahead to a certain extent. But Jaden, this is where the headlines really screw people up, right? It's like, well, Gemini is so much better. It really depends on what you like. I mean, I use ChatGPT probably more than I use anything else. I use just because I'm like, hey, I have this, you know, this, I just burned my hand. What do I do? Or, Hey, I have this stand on my carpet. What should I do? Or, Hey, like, you know, what's a better movie? No Country for Old Men or this, you know, cause I want to watch this with my son. That's Chachupi tea all day long for me. And then Gemini is sort of like a smarter Chachupi tea to me, but I use it for integrations, all that kind of stuff. And then, um, uh, Claude for me is the writer. Claude is the best writer of the bunch It has been has been for a while but then Jaden that chart that you put up there is unbelievably fascinating because the next things after so I know this is work on an audio medium here but behind the big three there was Kimmy and behind that was Deep Seek and then behind that was Grok. So when we think about like Meta and the struggles that Meta is having, Meta did not see this coming. Meta did not sort of like, and Jaden, weren't we just sort of seeing a headline? Because Jaden and I prepped for this show and we look at a bunch of different headlines and a bunch of different stories and sort of we were posting everywhere and Jaden has like other huge podcasts, some of the biggest in the world on this stuff. So what's the most interesting thing? What's resonant? And one of the things that we kind of put to the side that ended up on the cutting floor that I'm bringing back, Jaden, right now is that Meta has just slashed. What did they slash by 30% there? The Metaverse spending. Yeah. The Metaverse spending. So point is that when you see sort of like all the AI systems that are out there, Meta as open AI did not expect to be behind everyone, including two other open AI models from China. So it's not that Gemini or India is like, it's not like Chagipeteen needs a code red because it's not as smart. It needs a code red because it needs a whole business model around how is it going to keep people on that platform? 100%. The other thing that I think is really important to think about is OpenAI really needs to focus on continuing growth. Right now we have Anthropic that is currently warming up for an IPO. OpenAI, I think, is also preparing for an IPO, but I think they want to watch Anthropic to see how theirs goes first. That's my prediction anyways. and allegedly you know like open ai has a 500 million dollar valuation right now anthropic is shooting for their next round allegedly according to some insiders to hit a 300 million billion dollar valuation open ai 300 billion dollar or 500 billion dollars and so i think as they have these ipos looming they don't want to see stalled growth that is not going to look good on the ipo you want to you know growth may stall and inevitably it will stall like there's only so many humans on the planet so it's going to stall at some point um as far as users go but i think a worse problem is revenue decline which is apparently what um has been reported by futurism it says chadjubi is already stalling out on new subscribers if you go and look at tech crunch they have an article um which is called chadjubi's mobile app is seen slowing downloads and they have like basically a you you see a growth for quite a long time and then you see a plateau right now on mobile app downloads. So it feels like these new competitors really are taking a bit of a bite out of the market. I think it's 100% Gemini that is slowing their growth down. Doesn't necessarily mean they're in massive decline, but that's the next step. It goes growth, plateau, decline, if you don't fix something. And so I think OpenAI is concerned about that. Now, I think that you can look at some of their other competitors to see some other strategies that are being deployed. Aeropic has an amazing strategy. They never saw the same growth rate that OpenAI saw because because you know they were small model they had less funding they came out with their chat tool later but anthropic did an amazing thing where they really doubled down on enterprise and they doubled down on developers and they were able to see revenue do really really well they just signed a 200 million dollar deal um with snowflake anthropic did they kind of have on this multi-year so of course that's going to be over a few years but this is as a preparing for an ipo you can see they're signing all these big um contracts and opening i think also is trying to do some of that stuff. But Anthropik has done a great job, I think, of focusing on that specific niche and just trying to get revenue up. It doesn't really matter about users. OpenAI is all about mass users, right? They tout their 800 million weekly active users. If that dips, it's not very good for them. Gemini, I think, is threatening that because Google is a mass market. Everyone uses Gmail on a consumer level. So they already have the direct-to-consumer from Gmail and YouTube. Now they plugged Gemini into it and that kind of their markets OpenAI is fighting Google on all of this And to make matters worse Singva had a couple bad PR things One of them was a quote from the CEO of Salesforce Mark Benioff He said I used ChatGPT every day for three years. I just spent two hours on Gemini 3 and I'm not going back. The leap is insane. These are not things that OpenAI really wants to hear. These are some of the most prolific people in the space, but also some of the big partners that have worked with them for a long time saying they're going over to Google. So I feel like, you know, there's a there's a lot of drama right now. Apparently, according to, you know, the leaked memo from Sam Altman in his memo that he sent to all the employees, he said, we know we have some work to do, but we are catching up fast. I don't think it feels good to be, you know, you're supposed to be the market leader. And now he says we are catching up. I don't think it feels good for opening. I feel like they are catching up to Google or anyone else. So I think this is something that they're probably concerned about. As like it is eating into their revenue and into their users, and they have an IPO on the horizon, so they're really trying to hustle right now. I'm not even sure catching up is, in fairness to Sam Ullman, I'm not even sure catching up is the right term there. I don't think that they really need to catch up. I think it kind of feels like Mark Benioff at Salesforce has an agenda by saying that. Oh, 100%. I mean, because it's just not true. It's just like the leap between GPT 5.1 and Gemini 3, it's not insane. I mean, do I think Gemini 3 is smarter? I do. But now ChatGPT already has another model ready to go, garlic or whatever they're calling it. And Anthropic already, their models are phenomenal too. So it's just you always, even with, I don't know, even with like these Andre Carpathy interviews and things like that now where they're like, oh, I don't think this is the right way. I'm just feeling, Jaden, these days everybody just has an agenda, and it's kind of bumming me out a little bit. Guys, you just have to try the models yourself. You have to get ready. You have to just adapt to these things yourself. Just build it into your workflows. Figure out. These are all business processes, guys. This is not about which model is better. We like to talk about it on the show because it's fun. But most importantly, what model works for you in your job, in your life, everything else? Whatever gets you doing it, that's what you should be using. They're not so different that there's like a great one and a bad one. So just make sure, focus on what you do every day, not on the tool and these sort of like benchmarks. 100%. The last thing I'll say is if you really are looking for a way to upskill your organization on how to approach and look at these AI tools, how to implement them and actually apply them. The number one thing I recommend is Connor's AI Mindset course. I'll leave a link in the description. I know a lot of people ask about it. He has organizations that will buy thousands of seats for everyone in their whole organization. So what I actually recommend is talking to your manager, talking to the head of your department and trying to get access to the course for everyone inside of your department. then it's not just you that feels like you're upskilling a little bit with AI or a lot, but everyone around you. I find that when I was working in corporate, one of the things that was a struggle for me was inside of my department, I was very good at a number of tools there that everyone needed to use. And inevitably, everyone came to me and asked me for help on using all of these different software tools, which is like good, I guess, if you want to become indispensable. But honestly, my workload was way too high. So I had to start trying to teach people to do it. And anyways, it was kind of annoying. I wish that there was a training that people could have taken to learn that. And if you feel in the same situation with AI, because you're listening to this podcast, you're obviously in the AI bubble with us. You're one of the top, you know, AI people probably in your organization. I would highly recommend getting this course, access to this course for everyone in your department and everyone in your organization so that you don't have to do everything alone. All right. I'll leave a link in the description. I've talked about that. Thank you so much for coming to the podcast today. We really appreciate all of you. If you could leave a rating and review wherever you get your podcasts, it helps out a ton. and we'll catch you guys in the next episode.