I try not to be an alarmist. I try not to speak in absolutes because, honestly, I’ve been burned doing that too many times. But watching the moves OpenAI is making right now... it just feels like they are walking off a cliff. I don't understand the strategy. And it’s led me to do something I never thought I’d do: I am now almost fully converted over to using Google for my entire AI stack.
When It Felt Like Sorcery
To understand why I feel the need to write about this, you have to understand how deep my fandom ran. I was wholly sold on ChatGPT. I remember the first time I used it. It felt like absolute magic. It felt like sorcery. I found myself staring at the screen, genuinely wondering, How is it that I’m talking to a computer and it’s handling everything I throw at it?
It was a whole new way of thinking about things. A lot of people say AI makes you dumb, but I disagree. For me, it makes me feel like a super genius.
For me, the pinnacle of that "magic immersion" was the GPT-4 era. It was the moment where the tool felt boundless. But everything since then? It’s been a slow, quiet deflation.
The Immersion Breaks
If you’ve used OpenAI’s recent releases, you’ve probably felt it too. The models don't necessarily feel any stronger. Maybe they are on paper, or at the bleeding edge of coding. If anything, the personality that I used to get from the model—that spark that made it feel like a collaborator—has been diminished significantly. It feels incredibly generic now. I spent a long time building in custom instructions and training it on who I am, and it just seems like it misses a lot.
But the real sign of a shifting tide is how they are choosing to fund their business.
The Lowest Hanging Fruit
OpenAI recently started rolling out advertisements to their Free and Go tier chats. I get why companies need to make money. But for a company that built its reputation on pushing that bleeding edge of human-computer interaction, resorting to ads feels like the lowest-hanging fruit imaginable. It is the most boring, saturated market tactic to fund a business.
More than that, it breaks the magic immersion. When you are deep in a creative flow, trying to hold an idea together, the last thing you want is a sponsored placement interrupting your thought process. It feels like a knee-jerk reaction from a company that has lost its footing. It’s a blunder.
Where the Work Actually Happens Now
So where did I go? I went to Gemini. I didn't think it would ever happen, but I am spending almost all of my time in Gemini now. Whether I'm building my website, writing copy, or doing deep research, the Google stack just feels more robust and aligned with how I actually want to work. Every time Gemini adds something new, it feels like a sea change. It feels like a big moment.
Ironically, the one thing most people think Gemini is better at—image generation—is the one thing I still use OpenAI for. And honestly, I should probably just switch to Midjourney instead, because it's a much more robust system for getting the exact style dialed in. But for the heavy lifting? The thinking? The building? I've been wholly sold over on the Gemini stack.
Creatives don't have time for tools that are losing their edge. We need platforms that open up a whole new way of thinking. Right now, that magic is no longer residing in ChatGPT.
💬 Are you still holding onto your old stack, or have you made a jump too? I’m talking about workflow migrations and tool loyalty over on Threads. Join the conversation with me there. Connect on @Threads