OpenAI, a company backed by tech mogul Elon Musk, had its access to Twitter’s data shut off in December, per a report by the New York Times. According to two sources familiar with the situation, the move was because Musk felt the company was not paying enough for the roughly $2 million a year it had been paying to license the data. The decision came only weeks after the AI platform launched their ChatGPT.
Elon Musk is a tech entrepreneur and co-founder of OpenAI. He has been an outspoken critic of advanced AI for some time and was increasingly vocal about his feelings towards OpenAI heading in to the turn of the new year. His latest plans involve developing a chatbot similar to OpenAI’s viral success which he has referred to as ‘TruthGPT’ in order to “try and understand the nature of the universe”. In addition, he has been in conversations with Jimmy Ba, a professor at the University of Toronto, about the new venture. Musk has also brought on top researchers from Alphabet’s DeepMind to join Twitter’s ranks.
OpenAI is a research laboratory focused on developing technologies related to artificial general intelligence, seeking to “advance digital intelligence” in the world. It is a non-profit organization and was founded in 2015 with generous investments from Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Amazon. The company has created technologies such as GPT-3, the world’s largest language model, which processes text almost as if it were written by a human while allowing machines to learn automatically from the information they are given. The company has developed and released multiple products, ranging from sensing platforms to gaming environments.
Representatives for OpenAI and Elon Musk did not immediately respond to inquiries from Insider. It remains to be seen what the impact of this move will be on OpenAI and how it will affect the handling of Twitter’s data by the organization in the future.
