ChatGPT didn't have the stage to itself for long. Within weeks, every big company moved like they'd been caught dozing — panic in the boardroom, half-finished products shoved out the door.
- Google declared an internal "code red" and rushed out Bard, later rebuilt as Gemini.
- Microsoft poured billions into OpenAI and bolted Copilot into Windows, Office and Edge.
- Anthropic shipped Claude — strong on long documents and careful answers.
- Meta, Amazon, and a thousand startups all suddenly needed an AI story to tell investors.
What were they all racing toward? Three things. Better models — smarter, faster, and multimodal (text plus images, voice and video in one app). More users — and the monthly subscription, at roughly £16–20, quietly became the norm. And agents — AI that takes steps and does things, not just talks, which is where a lot of the 2025–2026 acceleration went.
I didn't pick a winner that month, and nobody sensible did either. Later in Ground Zero you'll get the full 2026 product map and tour these apps hands-on, so you can judge for yourself. For now, the thing to hold onto is simpler: one launch forced an entire industry to drop everything and pivot. That almost never happens.
Continue — a quick check, then Lesson 3: the patches, the refusals, and why I stopped trusting the rented apps.