Elon Musk took aim at OpenAI CEO Sam Altman again Friday over the company’s decision to abandon its original nonprofit model and make money, stoking a longstanding feud with his fellow OpenAI founder as the firm unveiled a powerful new text-to-video AI tool, Sora.
Key facts
- Musk shared a screenshot of an X user responding to Altman’s request for video captions to show off the capabilities of OpenAI’s newest AI tool, Sora, which can generate videos from a simple text prompt.
- The user, an account Musk frequently engages that claims to belong to a designer at meme-based cryptocurrency venture Dogecoin, suggested Altman prompt Sora with: “A guy turning a non profit open source company into a profit making closed source company.”
- The prompt is a reference to Altman’s role in turning OpenAI away from its nonprofit roots and into a business after Musk walked away from the firm, reportedly over conflicts of interest and disagreements over funding.
- Since then, Musk has regularly fired barbs at Altman, accusing the company of going from an open-source “counterweight to Google” to a “closed source, maximum-profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft,” which is closely tied and invested billions into OpenAI.
- In a similar vein, Musk used a monocle emoji—usually an expression of skepticism—to respond to another post referencing an Axios report about Altman, which claimed he owns OpenAI’s venture capital fund that launched in late 2021 and reported $175 million in commitments by last May.
- “I’m drawing a blank,” Musk said in another reply to an X post with a thinly veiled reference to OpenAI that asked: “What do you call a nonprofit that is for-profit, pledges to be open but is not open-source, and steals and sells data?”
Key background
Musk was a cofounder and early backer of ChatGPT creator OpenAI. When the startup launched in 2015, it positioned itself as a nonprofit alternative to big tech firms with a goal of developing general artificial intelligence that will benefit all of humanity.
Musk has claimed the company would not exist today without him, though his position on this has been contested, and the Tesla billionaire stepped away from the company in 2018. Musk’s departure allegedly came in the wake of a failed takeover attempt and conflicts of interest.
Musk has publicly criticized OpenAI and Altman for prioritizing profits over AI safety since and he is one of many high profile figures in the industry warning of the technology’s potential to wipe out humanity and urging companies to slow down in efforts to develop increasingly sophisticated software.
In a bid to continue his work on AI, Musk launched a separate AI venture, xAI, in November.
Its first product, an AI chatbot called Grok, has been styled as a rebellious and mischievous alternative to OpenAI’s generative AI chatbot ChatGPT, which triggered a race among companies to release similar products such as Google’s Gemini (formerly known as Bard).
Tangent
Musk has also been feuding with writer Stephen King, known for his famous novels like “It,” “The Green Mile” and “The Shining.” The author has bristled at changes made to Twitter since Musk took the helm in 2022.
“Just because you bought it doesn’t mean you own it,” the author said on the platform, slamming Musk’s decision to rebrand it as X and saying he would refuse to call it that.
Musk chided the author for “deadnaming” X, a term often used to describe referring to a transgender person by a name they used before transitioning and no longer go by. “Respect our transition,” Musk said, followed by a laughing face emoji.
Musk, who has a transgender daughter, has previously issued a series of widely criticized anti-trans posts and claimed the word “cis” is a “heterosexual slur.” Cis, or cisgender, is a term used to describe someone whose gender identity aligns with the sex they were assigned at birth.
Forbes valuation
We estimate Musk to be worth $205.5 billion, making him the world’s second richest person. He trails French luxury goods magnate Bernard Arnault, who is worth an estimated $222.7 billion and leads Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, worth an estimated $191.4 billion.
A good deal of Musk’s wealth comes from a series of companies he cofounded and runs, notably electric carmaker Tesla and rocket firm SpaceX.
This article was first published on forbes.com and all figures are in USD.
