OpenAI's Sam Altman faces an unpredictable force threatening his ambition to turn his startup into a trillion-dollar company: Elon Musk.
Since Donald Trump was elected president in November, ChatGPT executives have been preparing to deal with the incoming US administration — a process complicated by… Musk His emergence as a pivotal confidant of the president-elect.
OpenAI He was among Musk's rivals trying to anticipate how the billionaire could use his new vantage point in Washington, from pushing for new regulations targeting the company to influencing the award of lucrative government contracts that could boost Musk's xAI 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 degree that Elon has, to hurt your competitors and gain your own company,” Altman said in New York. Times Conference last week.
Trump He himself said Musk would put the national interest before his companies, while Musk said on his social media platform
“Nobody believes it for a second,” said the lawyer who has angered Musk in the past.
After they founded OpenAI together in 2015, the relationship between Musk and Altman fell apart. Tesla's CEO called Altman “fraudulent Sam” and filed a complaint Lawsuits against him and OpenAI, accusing them of “deception of Shakespearean proportions” as they seek to invalidate their multi-billion-dollar business partnership with Microsoft.
Musk is “one of a kind,” according to OpenAI's head of policy, Chris Lehane, a veteran politician who has helped companies like Airbnb and Coinbase overcome difficult regulatory hurdles. He added that OpenAI's approach would be to “control what we can control.”
The company was emphasizing its importance to Trump's agenda on three fronts, according to Lehan: enhancing US competitiveness, especially against China, rebuilding the economy and strengthening national security. Altman too Donate $1 million of his own money for Trump's inaugural fund.
“Ultimately, every American, in or out of government, will want to put the interests of the United States first,” Lehane said. “This administration has spoken during the campaign and since then about the necessity of . . . Artificial intelligence led by us is prevailing. If you want that to happen, OpenAI needs to be in the mix.
OpenAI has been at the forefront of the AI pack since launching ChatGPT in November 2022. It is currently changing its structure, in part to accommodate Increase foreign investment In an effort to stay ahead of the curve — a move that Musk's lawsuit claims betrays OpenAI's original mission.
On Friday, OpenAI responded in a blog post, alleging that Musk himself pushed for a similar structure in 2017, when he was still co-chair. The company said Musk “should compete in the marketplace, not in the courtroom.”
Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn and a board member of Microsoft, OpenAI's biggest backer, said he was “certainly concerned” that Musk's animosity toward Altman might influence Trump's AI policies.
“Obviously (someone of) integrity and character would say, 'Look, since I'm involved in this type of litigation and so on, I should keep myself separate from the government's work on these matters,'” Hoffman said.
He added that if Musk obscures his personal views and larger geopolitical rules and structures, it “portends potentially dangerous shortsightedness and a dangerous conflict of interest.”
People close to Musk said he was too principled to use his new role to target OpenAI with burdensome regulation, and it didn't make sense to do so given his powers as co-president of the new United States.Government Efficiency Department“It is to find ways to reduce regulation.
“You'll see a bunch of red tape being cut,” said one person who has invested in Musk and Altman. “OpenAI will have a streamlined process to get its data centers up and running quickly. It will be applied evenly across its range of competitors,” they added.
However, Musk could leverage his position as a central player in the incoming administration to advance artificial intelligence, according to an investor in one of his companies. “The United States government is the largest employer in the United States,” the person said. “As (Musk's) client network expands, will the government become a big client (of xAI)?”
Hoffman, a former OpenAI board member, speculated that Musk could use his position to slow down cutting-edge AI competitors.
“You can do all this kind of stuff if you're implementing a government policy to try to differentiate one company from another,” he said, adding that doing so “frankly would be very disruptive.” “It's devastating to the industry, and it's devastating to American society.”
Right now, the biggest challenge for Musk's OpenAI comes from direct competition from xAI, rather than political influence.
“Musk's companies probably have the largest private data set anywhere. They have satellite images from Starlink, videos from cars at Tesla and data from X. They have a serious problem,” said one person who has worked with both entrepreneurs.
xAI's latest chatbot, Grok-2, released in August, manages to compete with similar models from leading tech stacks, coming in behind Google's Gemini, OpenAI's ChatGPT, and Meta's Llama.
Earlier this year, Musk began work on Colossus, a supercomputer based in Memphis, Tennessee. By September, it was online and being used to train xAI's large language model, Grok, a competitor to OpenAI's latest generative AI system, GPT-4. “From start to finish, it was done in 122 days,” Musk wrote on X.
The data center houses more than 100,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs, more than any other single AI computing cluster. “There's only one person in the world who can do this,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said last October, and also referred to Colossus as “the fastest supercomputer on the planet as a single cluster.”
“The only feather in his cap — other than tormenting Altman — is the speed with which they launched the Colossus rocket,” said a major investor in a number of Musk's companies, including SpaceX and xAI. “No one has the same computational power as AI, and that's a big thing, but there's a lot to be determined.”
Aside from the new advantage Musk has gained through his proximity to the president-elect, the investor said the biggest threat to OpenAI remains his position at the helm of interconnected companies, vast personal wealth and the relentless work culture he has instilled at his companies.
“Elon can show things in the real world that others can't,” they said.
Additional reporting by Stephen Morris in San Francisco
