Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, is reportedly building an AI start-up to compete against OpenAI, the platform owned by parent company of ChatGPT. While Musk was among OpenAI’s co-founders, he has since been vocal in his criticism of the company and was one of the signatories to a letter calling for a pause on AI.
The Financial Times has recently reported that Musk is in talks with several investors to secure funding for his venture. An unnamed source revealed that, “A bunch of people are investing in it … it’s real and they are excited about it.” The past successes of Tesla and SpaceX, as well as Musk’s prowess as an entrepreneur make it quite clear that raising finances for this venture should not be an issue.
However, his acquisition of Twitter was said to have been far from successful in the initial months, the market cap of the company being halved in the time period. He has since made investments in thousands of high-power GPUs from Nvidia for the venture, foreshadowing the massive potential opportunities in AI chips in the coming times.
Following the letter calling for a halt to AI training more powerful than GPT-4, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, addressed the letter at an MIT event. He believes that moving with caution and increased rigor in addressing safety issues are a must. Earlier this year, Microsoft had announced a heavy investment in OpenAI and Google had previously released Bard, a tool similar to ChatGPT. However, Bard received poor reviews and this resulted in Alphabet’s market cap falling by $100 billion.
Google, however, remains optimistic about Bard, with Google CEO Sunder Pichai saying, “Bard seeks to combine the breadth of the world’s knowledge with the power, intelligence and creativity of our large language models. It draws on information from the web to provide fresh, high-quality responses.”
Chinese tech giants Alibaba and Baidu have also jumped on the same bandwagon, developing similar AI-powered products.
Musk, who’s already managing multiple companies, is likely to face harsh criticism over how he chose to deal with employees at Twitter post-acquisition. Tesla’s HR policies are also similarly under scrutiny, with issues like racial discrimination and layoffs.
Therefore, the question remains that if Musk is able to manage his already existing companies, will he be able to attract quality talent for his AI venture? We’ll have to wait and see.
OpenAI is a San Francisco-based artificial intelligence (AI) research laboratory consisting of the for-profit corporation OpenAI LP and its parent company, the non-profit OpenAI Inc. Founded in 2015, the mission of OpenAI is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity. The team of nearly 300 researchers and engineers consists of experts from all around the world, including renowned scientists such as Elon Musk, Sergey Brin, Greg Brockman, and Yann LeCun. OpenAI LP is a research arm of the organization, while OpenAI Inc seeks to create the beneficial AGI through safety tests and tools to ensure the AI’s safety and promote its positive impacts on society.
Sam Altman is a computer scientist and entrepreneur who currently acts as the CEO of OpenAI. He is a board member of OpenAI, co-founder of the seed accelerator Y Combinator (YC) and was the former president of YC. He also serves an investor on a number of companies such as Airbnb, Facebook, and Reddit. Before joining OpenAI, Altman co-founded the online education platform Loopt and served as the CEO of Asana, a web-based project management software widely used by many companies. His experience as an entrepreneur, investor, and technologist make him an ideal leader for OpenAI, as he can be relied upon to ensure the organization is always pushing boundaries and advancing AI technology for the benefit of humanity.
