Sam Altman reckons with a growing threat to OpenAI: Elon Musk

OpenAI: has been among Musk’s rivals trying to predict how the billionaire might use his newfound advantage in Washington, from pushing new regulations aimed at the company to influencing lucrative government contracts that could boost Musk’s own artificial intelligence xAI the startup.

“I strongly believe that Elon will do the right thing and that it would be very un-American to use political power, to the extent that Elon has it, to hurt your competitors and win your own business,” Altman said at a New York Times conference last week.

Trump Musk has said himself that he will put the national interest ahead of his companies, while Musk said on his social media platform X that rivals “rightly” expect him to be magnanimous.

“Nobody believes that for a second,” said the lawyer, who has drawn Musk’s ire in the past.

After launching OpenAI together in 2015, Musk and Altman’s relationship fell apart.The Tesla boss described Altman as “fraudster Sam” and went to court lawsuits against him and OpenAI, accusing them of “deception of Shakespearean proportions” in an attempt to void its multibillion-dollar commercial partnership with Microsoft.

Musk is “unique,” ​​according to OpenAI head of policy Chris Lehane, a political veteran who has helped companies like Airbnb and Coinbase overcome complex regulatory hurdles. OpenAI’s approach will be to “control what we we can control,” he added.

The company emphasized its importance to Trump’s agenda on three fronts, according to Lehen: strengthening US competitiveness, particularly against China, restructuring the economy and strengthening national security, Altman said by donating 1 million dollars from his own funds to Trump’s inauguration fund.

“Ultimately, every American, in or out of government [is] I want to put the interests of the United States first,” Lehane said. “This administration talked about the campaign and because the imperative . . . US-led AI dominates. If you want that to happen, OpenAI needs to be in the mix.”

OpenAI has been at the forefront of AI companies since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022. It is currently changing its structure to partially accommodate. greater foreign investment seeking to stay ahead, a move that Musk’s lawsuit says betrays OpenAI’s original mission.

OpenAI fired back in a blog post on Friday, claiming that Musk himself pushed for a similar structure when he was co-chairman in 2017. Musk “needs to compete in the marketplace, not the courtroom,” the company said.

LinkedIn founder and Microsoft board member Reed Hoffman, the biggest supporter of OpenAI, said he was “definitely concerned” that Musk’s animosity toward Altman would be reflected in Trump’s AI policy.

“Obviously [someone with] integrity and character would say, look, because I’m involved in these kinds of lawsuits and so forth, I have to stay out of the government’s way in these matters,” Hoffman said.

If Musk were to blur his personal views and larger geopolitical rules and structures, it “represents a potentially dangerous myopia and a dangerous conflict of interest,” he added.

People close to Musk said he was too principled to use his new role to push for heavy regulation on OpenAI, and it would make no sense to do so given his authority as the new US co-president.Department of Government Efficiency“is finding ways to reduce regulation.

“You’re going to see a lot of red tape cut,” said one person who invested in Musk and Altman’s companies. , they added.

Musk, however, may use his position as a central player in the incoming administration to promote xAI, according to one of his company’s investors [Musk’s] The client network is expanding, is the government becoming a major client? [for xAI]?”

Hoffman, a former OpenAI board member, suggested that Musk could use his position to slow down xAI’s rivals.

“You can just do all that if you’re implementing government policy to try to privilege one company over others,” he said, adding that it would be “frankly a very destructive thing. It’s destructive to the industry, it’s destructive to American society for”.

So far, Musk’s biggest challenge to OpenAI comes from direct competition from xAI, not political leverage.

“They have probably the most proprietary data anywhere. They have satellite imagery from Tesla, videos from cars, and X data,” said one person who has worked with both entrepreneurs.

xAI’s latest chatbot offering, the Grok-2, released in August, has been able to compete with similar models from leading tech groups, and is among Google’s Gemini, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and Meta Behind the Llama.

Earlier this year, Musk began work on the Colossus supercomputer, based in Memphis, Tennessee, which came online in September and was used to train Grok, OpenAI’s latest generative AI system. “It was done from start to finish in 122 days,” Musk wrote on X.

The data center houses more than 100,000 Nvidia H100 graphics processing units, more than any other individual AI computing cluster. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in October that “there was only one person in the world who could do this.” ,” and also referred to Colossus as “the fastest supercomputer on the planet as a single cluster.”

“The one feather in his cap, aside from torturing Altman, is the speed they got out of Colossus,” says Musk, a major investor in a number of companies including SpaceX and xAI. “Nobody has the same computing power For AI, and that’s a big deal, but there’s a lot to figure out.”

Regardless of Musk’s newfound advantage due to his proximity to the president-elect, the investor said the biggest threat to OpenAI remains his position at the helm of overlapping businesses, his vast personal wealth and the relentless work culture instilled in his companies.

“Elon can do things in the real world that others can’t,” they said.

Additional reporting by Stephen Morris in San Francisco