By Brent D. Griffiths
Publication Date: 2026-01-23 09:34:00
Sometimes a comeback story starts with a fumble.
A former top OpenAI researcher said Google’s AI renaissance is as much about OpenAI’s missteps as it is about what the search giant got right.
“Personally, what I think you should consider Google’s comeback, I think it’s OpenAI’s fumble,” Jerry Tworek, a former VP of research at OpenAI, said on a Wednesday episode of Ashlee Vance’s “Core Memory” podcast.
Tworek, who spent almost seven years at OpenAI, said earlier this month that he left the startup “to try to explore types of research that are hard to do at OpenAI.”
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman declared a “Code Red” in December amid increasing competition from Google. The tech giant received wide praise across the industry for the capabilities of its Gemini 3 AI model, which some observers said had surpassed ChatGPT.
While declining to detail what he described as OpenAI’s missteps, Tworek said that the…
