The year could hardly have started better for OpenAI: at the beginning of 2025, the company had many reasons to be happy with itself. Even more than two years after the release of the AI chatbot, ChatGPT’s dominance seemed unassailable. In terms of basic technology, the company had just once again demonstrated its own ability to innovate with new reasoning models. And back then, only particularly annoying critics of the hype used the term “AI bubble”.
