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OpenAI’s growing threat: Musk
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2024-12-17 12:03 2,336

Source: FT Chinese

OpenAI’s Sam Altman is dealing with an unpredictable force that threatens to bring his startup to The company’s ambition to transform into a trillion-dollar business: Elon Musk.

Since Donald Trump was elected president of the United States in November, executives at the developers of ChatGPT have been preparing for the upcoming U.S. — due to the importance of Musk becoming president-elect. With consultants, the process becomes more complex.

OpenAI has been one of Musk's rivals trying to predict how the billionaire will use his newfound advantage in Washington, from pushing for new regulations against the company to influencing lucrative contracts Awarded, the contracts could boost the development of Musk's own artificial intelligence startup, xAI.

Altman said at last week's New York Times conference: "I believe very strongly that Elon will make the right choice. If someone has as much power as Elon, And using this power to hurt competitors and benefit your own business would be extremely un-American." Trump himself has said that Musk will put interests above the interests of the company. , while Musk said on his social media platform X that competitors were "right" to expect him to be magnanimous.

“No one is going to believe this,” said one lawyer who once incurred Musk’s wrath.

Since co-founding OpenAI in 2015, the relationship between Musk and Altman has broken down. The Tesla boss called Altman "Crooked Sam" and filed a lawsuit against him and OpenAI, accusing them of "Shakespearean levels of deceit" while seeking to cancel his relationship with Microsoft ) business partnerships worth billions of dollars.

According to OpenAI director Chris Lehane, Musk is "unique." Lehane is a veteran who has helped companies like Airbnb and the Coinbase exchange navigate complex regulatory hurdles. He added that OpenAI's approach is to "control what we can control."

According to Lehane, the company has emphasized its importance to Trump's agenda in three areas: boosting U.S. competitiveness, especially against Trump, rebuilding the economy and strengthening security. Altman also donated $1 million of his own money to Trump's inaugural fund.

"At the end of the day, every American, inside and outside, is going to want to put America's interests first," Lehane said. "This was something that was talked about during the campaign and after, a U.S.-led victory in artificial intelligence." The necessity. If you want that to happen, then OpenAI must be involved." Since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022,OpenAI has always been at the forefront of artificial intelligence companies. It is currently revamping its structure, in part to attract more outside investment to stay ahead of the curve — a move that Musk's lawsuit claims betrays OpenAI's original intent.

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. The company said that Musk "should compete in the market, not in court."

Reed Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, member of the board of directors of Microsoft, and biggest supporter of OpenAI Reid Hoffman said he was "really concerned" that Musk's hostility toward Altman would be reflected in Trump's artificial intelligence. "Obviously, people of integrity and character are going to say, 'Look, since I'm involved in these lawsuits and so on, I should distance myself from the operations of the company on these matters,'" Hoffman said.

He added that if Musk blurs his personal views and larger geopolitical rules and structures, it "signals potentially dangerous shortsightedness and dangerous conflicts of interest."

People close to Musk said that Musk has his own principles and will not use his new role to impose onerous supervision on OpenAI. That doesn't make sense, given that his role as co-chairman of the new U.S. Efficiency Unit is to find ways to cut regulations.

“You’re going to see a lot of red tape being cut,” said one person who has invested in Musk and Altman’s companies. "OpenAI will have a streamlined process to quickly get their data centers up and running. This will apply equally to all competitors," they added.

However, Musk could use his central position in the incoming company to advance xAI, according to an investor in one of his companies. This person said: "The United States is the largest employer in the United States. As Musk's customer network expands, will it become a big customer of xAI?"

Huffman, a former OpenAI board member, speculated that Musk may Will use their position to slow down the development of xAI competitors.

“You can do all these things if you try to make one company better than the others when it comes to execution,” he said, adding that doing so is “frankly very damaging. . It’s harmful to the industry and harmful to American society.”

Currently, the biggest challenge OpenAI faces from Musk is xAI’s direct competition, not its influence.

"In Musk's company, they have probably the largest proprietary data set in the world. They have satellite images from Starlink, video from Tesla cars, X data. They are looking at it seriously That question,” said one person who has worked with the two entrepreneurs.

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

Earlier this year, Musk began developing a supercomputer called Colossus in Memphis, Tennessee. By September, it was online and 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 took a total of 122 days," Musk wrote on There are many AI computing clusters. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in October that "there's only one person in the world who can do this," calling Giant "the fastest supercomputer cluster on the planet, without a doubt."

A big investor in Musk’s companies, including SpaceX and xAI, said: “Besides tormenting Altman, what he’s most proud of is the speed with which they launched Titan. No one Having the same computing power in artificial intelligence is a big thing, but it's still There's a lot to be determined."

Despite Musk's newfound advantage due to his proximity to the president-elect, investors say the biggest threat to OpenAI remains his leadership in overlapping businesses. , vast personal wealth and the ruthless work culture instilled in his company.

They say: "Elon can achieve things in the real world that no one else can."

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