Here’s what’s on our plate today:

• 📰 Is OpenAI Losing Its Lead? Rivals drop AI browsers & poach talent.

• 🚨 UK’s “super-alignment” rules, Gupshup’s $60 M, Proton’s privacy chatbot.

• 🛠️ Arc’s AI browsing, Glarity’s instant TL;DR, and PageCrafter.

• ❓ How many IMO problems did the bots nail?

Let’s dive in. No floaties needed…

The Laboratory

Is OpenAI Losing Ground in The AI Race?

From chatbots to creative tools shaping entire industries, AI is everywhere. AI technology has triggered perhaps the most transformative shift since the advent of the smartphone. Back in 2022, when OpenAI showcased ChatGPT, it instantly had the world hooked on the transformative power of generative AI. Ever since, the company has been at the forefront of the industry, launching more powerful LLMs, developing a business plan, and spearheading the prospects of developing AI agents and AGI.

However, OpenAI is not alone in its pursuit of dominance in this fast-evolving field of technology. Google, Anthropic, Meta, Perplexity, DeepSeek, xAI, Inflection, Cohere, and Mistral AI all joined the race and are vying for a place at the helm of AI adoption. And, their efforts seem to be bearing fruit.

Crowded competition and missed opportunities

In July, reports emerged that OpenAI was close to releasing an AI-powered web browser that would challenge Alphabet’s market-dominating Google Chrome.

The importance of having a browser designed and run on the underlying technology developed by OpenAI would not only give it a leg up in acquiring a bigger customer base but also allow the company to venture into more avenues for revenue growth, including advertisements, an area currently dominated by Google. However, before the poster-child of AI made its move, other companies, including The Browser Company and Perplexity AI, beat it to the launch. Both companies launched their browsers within days of each other, making the AI-powered browser market a little more crowded than OpenAI may have liked.

Around the same time, Google, in a bid to retain its user base, announced a flurry of updates, bringing in more AI features within Search in addition to its existing features in its Chrome browser. And the story doesn’t end there.

Math Olympiad face-off

While other companies were launching products and announcing features, OpenAI scored a victory at the 2025 IMO, one of the world’s oldest and most challenging high-school-level math competitions. OpenAI’s model managed to achieve gold-medal scores.

The company entered its model into the competition, where it was able to ingest questions and generate proof-based answers in natural language. The model managed to answer five out of the six questions correctly, scoring higher than most high school students. However, OpenAI was not alone.

Google also entered its model in the competition, which managed to secure itself gold-medal scores, underlining just how closely matched the competitors seem to be in the AI race.

The results, while signaling a breakthrough in math capabilities for both the company’s AI models, came with a pinch of salt for OpenAI.

Last year, Google scored a silver medal at the IMO, using a system where a human translated the problems into a machine-readable format. At the time, OpenAI had shied away from entering the competition.

This year, however, OpenAI changed its mind only after it learned its model was capable of achieving gold-medal scores through third-party evaluators, which included three former IMO medalists who understood the grading system. So, while OpenAI used to have a significant lead over the industry, it would appear the company is now a lot more cautious of competitors catching up.

Financial and structural hurdles

In December 2024, reports emerged that OpenAI, in a bid to raise more investments, was looking to remove a clause that would keep Microsoft out of its most advanced models when it achieved “artificial general intelligence.” Since then, the company secured $40 billion at a $300 billion valuation. However, the company needs to complete its transition to a for-profit company by the end of the year to secure the full $40 billion funding led by SoftBank. A move made difficult by its worsening relationship with Microsoft.

OpenAI executives have reportedly considered accusing Microsoft of anticompetitive behavior in a bid to have regulators review the terms of its contract. It is reported to include a clause requiring the Windows-maker’s approval to transition into a public-benefit corporation, a move required to ensure OpenAI can attract more investments to fund its quest for AGI.

While the start-up is working on restructuring, it is also faced with the challenge of retaining talent that made the company the star of the AI world.

OpenAI’s talent drain

Since the much-publicised, but brief, ouster of CEO Sam Altman in 2023, several senior figures have left the AI startup amid friction over product‑focused vs. safety‑focused priorities.

Beginning with co‑founder and chief scientist, Ilya Sutskever, who left the company in May 2024 to pursue “a new, personally meaningful project”, the company has witnessed several high-profile departures.

Jan Leike, the head of superalignment, also left the company in 2024, followed by John Schulman, co‑founder and reinforcement learning lead.

In September 2024, three more top technical leaders, Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati, VP Research Barret Zoph, and Chief Research Officer Bob McGrew, all quit OpenAI.

Departures have also been stoked by rivals looking to bolster their teams in the quest for AGI. In June 2025, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg hired three OpenAI researchers to join his "superintelligence" team. The departures followed public claims by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman that Meta was offering his employees bonuses of $100 million to recruit them.

Pressure from China’s AI ambitions

OpenAI is coping with increasing pressure to make substantial progress in products, showcase the versatility of its models, and all while contending with talent departures.

Once the flagbearer of the progress of AI tech, at least in public perception, the start-up is also facing competition from Chinese AI companies.

Recently, the company highlighted in a blog post the progress made by Beijing-backed Zhipu AI, saying it has made “notable progress” in the AI race. The China-based startup is reported to have offices in the Middle East, the United Kingdom, Singapore, and Malaysia, and is running joint “innovation centers” projects across Southeast Asia, including in Indonesia and Vietnam.

This comes at a time when OpenAI has received Washington’s support to promote its foundational models as the world’s go-to AI offering and was awarded a $200 million contract to provide the U.S. Defense Department with artificial intelligence tools. However, in the global race for AI dominance, Chinese AI companies are not far off.

Navigating the uncertain road ahead

OpenAI was the first company to woo the world with its generative AI capabilities. Few companies in history have managed to become part of the public conscience in such a short period, and the kind of impact on the future of work and business that OpenAI has had.

While OpenAI has reaped the rewards of being the proverbial early bird, as rivals release products faster, poach talent, and match performance benchmarks, the startup’s next moves could decide whether it remains the standard-bearer, or one of many strong players, in the AI race

Quicks Bits, No Fluff

• UK & EU Plot Rules For “Super-Alignment” Research – Leaked white-paper says frontier-model labs must share safety breakthroughs or face funding cuts.

• Gupshup Bags $60 M – The Indian conversational-AI veteran tops up with equity + debt to build vertical “agents-as-a-service,” but its $1 B unicorn badge isn’t quite back yet.

• Proton’s Private Chatbot – The encrypted-email company launches an opt-in AI assistant that stores prompts & answers end-to-end-encrypted on Swiss servers.

Three Things Worth Trying

• Arc AI “Browse for Me”: Fire one prompt & get a clean, citation-rich auto-summary instead of 37 tabs.

• Glarity AI Reader: One-click TL;DR for PDFs, YouTube vids & pay-walled articles – handy while the open-web walls go up.

• PageCrafter AI: Transform your content creation workflow and generate blog posts, articles, and web content that ranks on Google.

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