OpenAI’s Sam Altman considers Elon Musk an unpredictable force threatening his ambition to turn a startup into a trillion-dollar company.
Since Donald Trump was elected president in November, executives at ChatGPT makers have been preparing to respond to the incoming US administration, but Musk’s emergence as a vital confidant of the president-elect has given rise to challenges. Processes are becoming more complex.
OpenAI is one of Musk’s rivals, from pushing new regulations targeting the company to influencing the award of lucrative government contracts that could boost Musk’s own artificial intelligence startup. Even giving away is trying to predict how the billionaire will use his new advantageous position in Washington. xA.I.
“I strongly believe that Mr. Elon will do the right thing, and it is highly unethical for him to use his level of political power to the detriment of a competitor and to the advantage of his own business,” Mr. Altman said in New York. It’s American,” he said. Last week’s Times Conference.
Trump himself has said Musk will put the nation’s interests ahead of his own companies, but Musk said on his social media platform X that his rivals are “right” to expect leniency from him. .
“Nobody would believe that,” said a lawyer who has drawn Musk’s ire in the past.
Although they founded OpenAI together in 2015, Musk and Altman’s relationship fell apart. Tesla CEO describes Altman as ‘Sneaky Sam’ and accuses Altman and OpenAI of ‘Shakespearean deception’ while calling for multibillion-dollar commercial partnership with Microsoft to be annulled and filed a lawsuit.
Chris Lehane, head of policy at OpenAI, a political veteran who has helped companies like Airbnb and Coinbase navigate difficult regulatory hurdles, said Musk is “unique.” OpenAI’s approach will be to “control what can be controlled,” he added.
Mr. Lehane said the company emphasized its importance to President Trump’s policies in three ways, specifically: increasing competitiveness against China, rebuilding the economy and strengthening national security. Mr. Altman also donated $1 million of his own money to President Trump’s inaugural fund.
“At the end of the day, I think every American, both in and out of government, will want to put America’s interests first,” Lehane said. “This administration has talked about the campaign and since then, the mandate of . . . U.S.-led AI is here to stay. If we want to make that happen, OpenAI needs to be part of that.”
OpenAI has been at the forefront of AI companies since launching ChatGPT in November 2022. The company is currently changing its structure in part to accommodate increased outside investment to stay ahead, a move Musk’s lawsuit claims betrays OpenAI’s original mission. I am doing it. .
On Friday, OpenAI fired back in a blog post, claiming that Musk himself pushed for a similar structure in 2017, when he was still co-chairman. The company said Musk should “compete in the marketplace, not in the courts.”
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Reid Hoffman, a board member at Microsoft, the founder of LinkedIn and OpenAI’s biggest backer, said he was “certainly concerned” that Musk’s hostility toward Altman would influence Trump’s AI policy. “There is,” he said.
“Obviously, any person of integrity and integrity would say that because I’m involved in these types of lawsuits and things like that, I should stay out of government operations on these things,” Hoffman said. .
He added that if Mr. Musk obscures his personal views or larger geopolitical rules and structures, it “foreigns potentially dangerous myopia and dangerous conflicts of interest.”
Officials close to Musk say he is too principled to use his new role to target OpenAI with onerous regulations, including as co-chair of the U.S.’s new Department of Government Efficiency. He said it didn’t make sense to do so given the mission. How to reduce regulation.
“It’s going to eliminate a lot of red tape,” said one person who invested in Musk and Altman’s company. “OpenAI has a streamlined process for getting data centers up and running quickly, and that applies across the entire set of competitors as well,” they added.
But investors in Mr. Musk’s company say he may use his position as a central figure in the next administration to push xAI forward. “The U.S. government is America’s largest employer,” the official said. “As[Musk’s]customer network expands, will the government become a big customer[for xAI]?”
Hoffman, a former director of OpenAI, speculated that Musk could use his position to delay competitors’ entry into xAI.
“If you’re implementing government policies that are trying to favor some companies over others, you can do all that,” he said, adding, “It’s frankly very destructive. It’s a terrible act,” he added. It’s destructive to the industry and it’s destructive to American society. ”
For now, Musk’s biggest challenge to OpenAI lies not in political influence but in direct competition with xAI.
“In all of Mr. Musk’s company, they probably have the largest proprietary data set anywhere. It includes satellite imagery from Starlink, video from Tesla cars, and X-data. They’re making serious cracks at it. ,” said a person who has worked with both entrepreneurs.
xAI’s latest chatbot product, Grok-2, released in August, manages to compete with similar models from big tech groups, ranking behind Google’s Gemini, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and Meta’s Llama.
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Earlier this year, Musk began work on Colossus, a supercomputer based in Memphis, Tennessee. By September, it was online and used to train xAI’s large-scale language model Grok, a rival to OpenAI’s latest generative AI system GPT-4. “From start to finish, it was completed in 122 days,” Musk wrote of X.
This 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 he was “the only person in the world who could do that,” calling Colossus “easily the fastest supercomputer on the planet as a single cluster.” “Computer,” he said.
“Other than torturing Altman, Musk’s only thing is the speed with which they destroy Colossus,” said a large investor in many of Musk’s companies, including SpaceX and xAI. “No one has the same computational power when it comes to AI, and that’s a big problem, but there are a lot of decisions to be made.”
Regardless of the new advantages Musk has gained through his proximity to the president-elect, the biggest threats to OpenAI remain his position at the helm of overlapping businesses, his vast personal wealth, and the tolerance he has instilled in his company. The investor said there was a poor work culture.
“Elon can do things in the real world that others can’t,” they said.
Additional reporting by Stephen Morris in San Francisco
