Sometimes, the story of a comeback begins with a fumble.
A former top OpenAI researcher said Google’s AI renaissance is as much about OpenAI’s mistakes as it is about what the search giant did right.
“Personally, I think it’s the failure of OpenAI that I think Google should consider coming back,” Jerry Turek, former vice president of research at OpenAI, said on Wednesday’s episode of Ashley Vance’s podcast “Core Memory.”
Tworek, who spent about seven years at OpenAI, said earlier this month that he left the startup “to explore the types of research that are difficult to do at OpenAI.”
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman declared a “code red” in December as competition with Google intensified. The tech giant was widely praised across the industry for the capabilities of its Gemini 3 AI model, with some observers saying it outperformed ChatGPT.
Tworek did not go into details of what he described as OpenAI’s failures, but said the pioneering AI company should never have lost the lead it built with the release of ChatGPT in 2022.
“If you are a company that is ahead of the curve and has all the benefits that OpenAI has, you should always be ahead of the curve,” he said.
Overall, Turek said, “Google did a lot of things right.”
“Very clearly, Google started getting serious about training language models at scale at that moment. Just as OpenAI was fumbling around with the lead, it’s now very close in terms of capabilities and trained models,” he said, adding that when OpenAI showed that ChatGPT could generate revenue, the industry as a whole started increasing investment in AI.
Regarding OpenAI, Tworek said the heavy toll of the AI race has led the company, which has turned from a nonprofit research institute to a public interest corporation, to focus less on high-risk research that may not yield results. An OpenAI spokesperson did not respond to Business Insider’s request for comment.
“There are many different facets to certain things that we do in companies today where we have to engage in very, very brutal and competitive competition to create the best AI models in the world,” he said. “One of the dynamics is how much risk a company is willing to take in terms of keeping up.”
Tworek said, “All major AI companies are facing pressure to demonstrate user growth and pay for GPUs while competing to be the best model available.”
“That somehow affects your appetite for the risks you’re willing to take,” he says.
Do you work at OpenAI or Google? Contact reporters from non-work emails and devices. bgriffiths@businessinsider.com
