Google had everything, but OpenAI won:How Sam Altman beat giants like Sundar Pichai and Elon Musk changed AI industry forever

The year is 2016. The world is about to witness something once considered impossible. But this wasn’t happening at a rocket launch, inside a military laboratory, or on a battlefield. It was happening on a simple wooden board in a centuries-old Chinese strategy game called Go. For decades, chess had been considered the ultimate test of strategic intelligence. But Go was an entirely different beast. While chess has approximately 400 possible move combinations after the first two moves, Go has nearly 130,000. Its possibilities are so astronomically large that the estimated number of possible board configurations exceeds the number of atoms in the observable universe. In March 2016, Google’s AI system, AlphaGo, faced South Korean Go legend Lee Sedol, one of the greatest players in the history of the game. What followed stunned the world. AlphaGo defeated Lee Sedol by four games to one. A machine had beaten one of humanity’s finest minds at a game that was widely considered too complex for computers to master. But this victory revealed something much bigger than Google’s ability to build an intelligent gaming machine. It demonstrated that artificial intelligence was entering an entirely new era. And Google appeared to have everything needed to dominate it: world-class researchers, enormous computing infrastructure, vast amounts of data, and billions of dollars in financial resources. Yet, something unexpected happened. The company that would eventually bring generative AI into the homes of hundreds of millions of people wasn’t Google. It wasn’t founded by Larry Page, Sergey Brin, or Sundar Pichai. Instead, it was a relatively young organisation called OpenAI, led by a man named Sam Altman. In November 2022, when OpenAI launched ChatGPT, it changed the public’s relationship with artificial intelligence almost overnight. Suddenly, people could have conversations with machines, write code, generate content, analyse information, and accomplish tasks that once seemed impossible. Google, despite having spent years researching AI, was suddenly being forced to defend its position. And here’s where the story gets even more interesting. Because the man who helped create OpenAI alongside Sam Altman was none other than Elon Musk. The same Elon Musk who would eventually become one of its fiercest opponents. When Google had all the money, talent, and data in the world, why didn’t Google become the pioneer of AI? In 2014, Google acquired DeepMind, a London-based artificial intelligence research company founded by Demis Hassabis, Shane Legg, and Mustafa Suleyman. It wasn’t just another technology acquisition. Google was bringing some of the world’s brightest AI researchers under its roof. The results were extraordinary. In March 2016, DeepMind’s AlphaGo defeated Lee Sedol in a five-game match, winning four games. It was a landmark moment that demonstrated how neural networks and reinforcement learning could solve problems that had previously seemed beyond the reach of machines. In 2017, a group of Google researchers published a research paper titled Attention Is All You Need. It introduced the Transformer architecture, a breakthrough that would eventually become the technological foundation of modern large language models, including GPT, Gemini, and Claude. Think about that for a moment. Google had helped create the technology that would eventually power the AI revolution. Yet, when ChatGPT arrived in November 2022, Google suddenly found itself playing catch-up. When ChatGPT became a global sensation, Google was forced to respond. In February 2023, Google announced Bard, its conversational AI chatbot. But its launch was overshadowed by an embarrassing factual error in a promotional demonstration. Google subsequently combined its Brain and DeepMind teams to accelerate its AI efforts and develop Gemini. How did Sam Altman and his small team at OpenAI beat Google in its own game? To understand Altman’s success, we need to rewind to 2015. At the time, Sam Altman was already a prominent figure in Silicon Valley. He had served as president of Y Combinator, one of the world’s most influential startup accelerators. He understood how startups raised money, attracted talent, and turned ambitious ideas into businesses. But he also shared a growing concern about artificial intelligence with another technology billionaire: Elon Musk Musk believed that advanced AI could become one of humanity’s greatest existential threats. He was particularly concerned about the concentration of AI power in the hands of a few corporations. And Google, with DeepMind under its control, was an obvious source of concern. So, in December 2015, Altman, Musk, and several other prominent technology figures helped establish OpenAI as a nonprofit artificial intelligence research organisation. In 2019, OpenAI created a capped-profit subsidiary under its nonprofit parent. This allowed the organisation to raise substantial capital while retaining nonprofit control. Then came Microsoft. In July 2019, Microsoft announced a $1 billion investment in OpenAI, along with a strategic partnership that would make Azure its exclusive cloud provider. This gave OpenAI access to the computing infrastructure it desperately needed to develop increasingly powerful AI systems. In 2020, OpenAI released GPT-3, a large language model capable of generating remarkably human-like text. Developers could access it through an API and build applications on top of it. Then, in November 2022, OpenAI launched ChatGPT. Unlike earlier AI tools, ChatGPT didn’t require coding knowledge, technical expertise, or an understanding of machine learning. Anyone could open a website, type a question, and start talking to an AI. Within five days, ChatGPT had attracted one million users. It was a defining moment. OpenAI had taken a technology that researchers had spent years developing and packaged it into an experience that ordinary people could understand within seconds. With Gemini, DeepSeek, and Claude already catching up with ChatGPT, while OpenAI is bleeding losses, does OpenAI even have a future? For a moment, it looked as though OpenAI had won the AI race. ChatGPT had become a household name, Microsoft had integrated OpenAI’s technology into its products, and Google was scrambling to catch up. But here’s the catch: being first to popularise a technology doesn’t mean you will dominate it forever. OpenAI is now facing competition from three very different directions. Google has something that OpenAI cannot easily replicate: an enormous existing ecosystem. Android, Search, Gmail, YouTube, Chrome, Google Workspace, and its cloud infrastructure give Gemini access to billions of potential users and a massive distribution advantage. Founded in 2021 by former OpenAI researchers, Anthropic has positioned itself as a major competitor, particularly in enterprise AI, coding, and AI safety. Its Claude models and developer-focused products have helped it attract businesses that need AI for serious professional work. DeepSeek shook the AI industry by demonstrating that highly capable AI models could be developed with a different approach to training and computing efficiency. Its rise challenged the assumption that only companies spending enormous sums on computing infrastructure could compete at the frontier of AI. According to Similarweb estimates for September 2026, ChatGPT accounted for approximately 56.4% of global AI chatbot website visits, while Gemini captured 25%, Claude 9.6%, and DeepSeek 3.4%. The billion-dollar question: Can OpenAI actually make money? According to financial statements reported in June 2026, OpenAI generated approximately $13.1 billion in revenue in 2025 but recorded an operating loss of around $20.9 billion. The company also reported a cash burn of approximately $3.7 billion in the first quarter of 2026, compared with $5.7 billion in revenue during the same period. Its research and development expenditure reached approximately $8.6 billion in that quarter. These figures highlight a fundamental problem: OpenAI is generating substantial revenue, but developing and operating increasingly powerful AI systems requires enormous investment. And the spending hasn’t stopped. The company needs computing infrastructure, advanced chips, data centres, top researchers, and increasingly sophisticated models to remain competitive. OpenAI has already built one of the world’s most recognisable AI products, but it still needs enormous amounts of capital to develop better models, maintain computing infrastructure, attract researchers, and compete with companies like Google and Anthropic. Meanwhile, the battle between Musk and Altman has become personal Remember, Elon Musk was one of the people who helped establish OpenAI in 2015. But after leaving the organisation, Musk increasingly criticised its transformation into a commercial AI business. In 2024, he sued OpenAI and Sam Altman, alleging that they had abandoned the organisation’s original nonprofit mission. OpenAI disputed his claims and argued that Musk had supported the need for a for-profit structure when the organisation required greater funding. The dispute eventually reached a jury in 2026. In May, a federal jury ruled against Musk, finding that his lawsuit had been filed outside the applicable statute of limitations. The judge accepted the verdict and dismissed his claims. However, the decision was based on the timing of the lawsuit. It was not a judicial endorsement of every decision OpenAI had made or a definitive ruling on the philosophical debate surrounding its founding mission. Meanwhile, OpenAI completed a major corporate restructuring in October 2025, becoming a public benefit corporation controlled by the OpenAI Foundation. So, who will actually win the AI war? Here’s the interesting part: the AI race is no longer a competition between two companies. It’s becoming a battle between completely different business models. Google has distribution, infrastructure, and decades of research. Anthropic is aggressively targeting enterprise customers and developers. DeepSeek has challenged conventional assumptions about the cost of developing capable AI models. And OpenAI has something incredibly valuable: a product that introduced millions of people to generative AI and helped create an entirely new market. Google invented some of the foundational technology behind modern generative AI, but OpenAI showed the world what could be done with it.