OpenAI has deployed a new “o3 Pro” reasoning model to power ChatGPT, replacing the previous o1-pro system. The update, introduced this week, is marketed as a major performance gain in programming, scientific and business tasks and is immediately available to users of the chatbot. Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman is positioning the upgrade as a step toward challenging Google’s dominance in search. ChatGPT, said to be the fastest-growing platform ever, has reached this point only 925 days—about two-and-a-half years—after its launch. OpenAI is now concentrating on expanding usage among people under 30 and has added further capacity on Google Cloud to support growth. Analysts describe o3 Pro as marking “Level 2” progress on OpenAI’s path toward artificial general intelligence, reinforcing the network effects, scale advantages and switching costs that favour first movers in generative AI. Competitors are mobilising: French startup Mistral unveiled a new “Magistral” reasoning suite, Meta assembled a 50-person AGI team under Mark Zuckerberg, and ByteDance introduced Seedance 1.0, a model that tops benchmarks for text- and image-to-video generation.