OpenAI's Sam Altman is counting on an unpredictable force to threaten his ambitions to show the startup right into a trillion-dollar company: Elon Musk.
Since Donald Trump was elected president in November, executives on the ChatGPT maker have been preparing to take care of the brand new US administration – a process complicated by Musk's emergence because the president-elect's key confidant.
OpenAI is amongst Musk's rivals attempting to predict how the billionaire might use his latest position in Washington, from pushing for brand new regulations targeting the corporate to influencing the awarding of lucrative government contracts to Musk's own startup for artificial intelligence could boost xAI.
“I imagine pretty strongly that Elon will do the correct thing and that it might be profoundly un-American to make use of political power to the extent that Elon has it to harm your competitors and profit your individual firms,” said Altman in a New York Times conference interview last week.
Trump himself said Musk would put the national interest above his firms, while Musk said on his social media platform X that rivals had “rightly” expected magnanimity from him.
“No one believes this for a second,” said a lawyer who has drawn Musk’s ire prior to now.
After Musk and Altman co-founded OpenAI in 2015, the connection between Musk and Altman collapsed. The Tesla boss has called Altman a “fraudulent Sam” and filed lawsuits against him and OpenAI, accusing them of “fraud of Shakespearean proportions” and searching for to dissolve the multibillion-dollar business partnership with Microsoft.
Musk is “unique,” said OpenAI policy chief Chris Lehane, a political veteran who has helped firms like Airbnb and Coinbase overcome tricky regulatory obstacles. OpenAI's approach can be to “control what we will control,” he added.
Lehane said the corporate emphasized its importance to the Trump agenda on three fronts: increasing U.S. competitiveness, particularly vis-à-vis China, rebuilding the economy and strengthening national security. Altman can also be donating $1 million of his own money to Trump's inaugural fund.
“Ultimately, every American, whether in or out of presidency, will wish to put America’s interests first,” Lehane said. “This government has spoken in regards to the need throughout the election campaign and since then. . . US-led AI is catching on. If that is to occur, OpenAI should be involved.”
OpenAI has been on the forefront of AI firms because the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022. The company is currently changing its structure, partly to permit for greater outside investment and stay at the highest – a move that Musk's lawsuit says betrays OpenAI's original mission.
On Friday, OpenAI hit back in a blog post, claiming that Musk himself had pushed for an analogous structure in 2017, when he was still co-chairman. Musk “should compete within the marketplace, not the courtroom,” the corporate said.
Reid Hoffman, founding father of LinkedIn and a board member at Microsoft, OpenAI's biggest backer, said he was “actually concerned” that Musk's hostility toward Altman would impact Trump's AI policies.
“Of course (someone with) integrity and character would say, look, since I'm involved in these sorts of lawsuits, etc., I should keep away from the federal government's involvement in this stuff,” Hoffman said.
If Musk were to blur his personal views and broader geopolitical rules and structures, “it suggests potentially dangerous short-sightedness and dangerous conflicts of interest,” he added.
People near Musk said he was too principled to make use of his latest role to focus on OpenAI with strict regulation, and that it made no sense to achieve this given his job as co-chair of a brand new U.S. American “Department of Government Efficiency” is considering ways to limit regulation.
“They’re going to chop quite a lot of bureaucracy,” said one one who has invested in Musk and Altman’s firms. “OpenAI could have a streamlined process to get its data centers up and running quickly. It can be applied equally to all participants,” they added.
However, in accordance with an investor in considered one of his firms, Musk could use his position as a central player in the brand new government to advance xAI. “The U.S. government is the most important employer within the U.S.,” the person said. “Will the federal government change into an enormous customer (for xAI) as (Musk’s) customer network expands?”
Hoffman, a former OpenAI board member, speculated that Musk could use his position to thwart xAI competitors.
“That's the sort of thing you could possibly just do for those who implement government policy and take a look at to privilege one company over others,” he said, adding that it might be “a really destructive approach, quite frankly.” It's destructive for the industry, it’s destructive to American society.”
Currently, Musk's biggest challenge to OpenAI is direct competition from xAI, not political influence.
“Of all of Musk's firms, they probably have the most important proprietary data set anywhere. They have satellite images from Starlink, videos of cars at Tesla, and X-data. They have serious problems with it,” said one one who has worked with each entrepreneurs.
xAI's latest chatbot offering, Grok-2, released in August, has managed to compete with similar models from leading tech giants, hot on the heels of Google's Gemini, OpenAI's ChatGPT and Meta's Llama.
Earlier this yr, Musk began work on Colossus, a supercomputer based in Memphis, Tennessee. By September it was online and getting used to coach xAI's large language model, Grok, a rival to OpenAI's latest generative AI system, GPT-4. “From start to complete it was done in 122 days,” Musk wrote on X.
The data center houses greater than 100,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs, greater than every other single AI computing cluster. Jensen Huang, Nvidia's chief executive, said in October that “there was just one person on this planet who could try this,” and likewise called Colossus “by far the fastest supercomputer on the planet as a cluster.”
“The only thing he has going for him — other than tormenting Altman — is the speed at which they released Colossus,” said a serious investor in various Musk firms, including SpaceX and xAI. “Nobody has the identical computing power for AI and that’s an enormous deal, but there’s still loads to work out.”
Regardless of the brand new advantage Musk gained through his proximity to the president-elect, the investor said the most important threat to OpenAI stays its position at the highest of overlapping firms, vast personal wealth and the unforgiving work culture embedded in its firms.
“Elon can manifest things in the true world that others cannot,” they said.
