The conversations at the very helm of AI, a radical new technology which could change the course of humanity, are now indistinguishable from those at a middle-school playground.
Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman have gone at each other on X. Musk had earlier accused Apple of promoting ChatGPT within its app, and said that it was artificially making sure that no AI app other than ChatGPT could reach the top spot. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman had not rejected his claims, but accused X of similarly throttling viewpoints opposed by Musk. This led to Musk brand Altman a liar.
“You got 3M views on your bullshit post, you liar, far more than I’ve received on many of mine, despite me having 50 times your follower count!” Musk told Altman. Musk seemed to be hinting that if he really were changing the X algorithm, he wouldn’t have let Altman’s accusations get so much visibility on his own platform.
Altman has now replied to his post with a post of his own. He simply replied “skill issue” to Elon’s accusations, which is a popular put-down on X, which suggested that Musk didn’t have the skills to make sure his posts were viewed by a wide number of people. “Or bots”, Altman added, hinting that the view-counts that X was displaying could be fake.
But then Altman came up with a challenge of his own. “will you sign an affidavit that you have never directed changes to the X algorithm in a way that has hurt your competitors or helped your own companies? i will apologize if so,” Altman said.
It remains to be seen if Musk responds to the affidavit challenge, but there’s no love lost between Elon Musk and Sam Altman. Musk, along with Sam Altman, had co-founded OpenAI as a non-profit in 2015, and had been the chief financial backer of the company. But differences between the team arose over how OpenAI would raise funding, and Musk wanted OpenAI to be subsumed within Tesla. The other co-founders didn’t agree, and Musk exited the company in 2018 and pulled his funding. But in 2019, OpenAI raised funding from Microsoft through a for-profit arm, and in 2022, released ChatGPT. After ChatGPT’s overnight success, Musk accused OpenAI CEO Sam Altman of essentially scamming him by first getting him to put his money into OpenAI as a non-profit, which meant that he received no shares, and then turning it into a for-profit enterprise that’s now worth $400 billion. Musk had then responded by creating a new AI company, named xAI, and it now competes fiercely with OpenAI.
The attacks between the duo have gotten personal in the past. Musk has previously called Sam Altman “Scam Altman”, and Altman has called in question Musk’s dual loyalties when he was involved with President Trump’s campaign. But the latest salvo seems more bitter than before, with Musk speaking of liars and “bullshit”, with Altman insulting his posting skills. It remains to be seen how this battle shapes up, but as of now, the AI race is heating up in ways that one hadn’t entirely expected.