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There’s nearly by no means a uninteresting second on the AI beat, and at present was no exception: The Wall Road Journal this afternoon reported {that a} consortium of personal buyers led by the world’s wealthiest man, the multi-company proudly owning Elon Musk, had introduced a bid of $97.4 billion to OpenAI’s non-profit board of administrators to amass the for-profit subsidiary of the corporate led by former co-founder turned rival, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
Placing apart the lengthy and messy historical past between the 2 males, which has already resulted in a number of lawsuits, Musk’s acknowledged aim of wanting to amass one other firm atop the six he already owns or runs (SpaceX, Tesla, Starlink, Neuralink, X, xAI) is to make OpenAI open supply, per its unique founding mission assertion of delivering AI advantages and synthetic basic intelligence (AGI) for all.
“It’s time for OpenAI to return to the open-source, safety-focused power for good it as soon as was,” Musk stated in a press release supplied by his lawyer to the Journal. “We are going to guarantee that occurs.”
The takeover bid can also be private for Musk, who after co-founding and bankrolling the corporate in 2015 alongside Altman and 9 others, determined to exit the venture in 2018, solely to show into certainly one of its greatest public critics and enterprise rivals. He based his personal xAI startup in 2023 and is constructing an enormous AI mannequin coaching supercluster of graphics processing models (GPUs) in Memphis, Tennessee, generally known as Colossus.
Musk’s double-speak
But the bid to manage OpenAI would appear to be a tacit admission. Regardless of all his speedy and hefty funding in spinning up a competitor — the rival Grok chatbot baked into social community X, and the underlying Grok-2 massive multimodal mannequin and utility programming interface (API) for third social gathering software program builders — Musk will not be succeeding at profitable as many customers as he and his collaborators may like.
It could additionally counsel that the Grok-3 mannequin — reportedly in coaching, and which pseudonymous AI rumor accounts on X have hyped as industry-leading — is perhaps not as advanced or ready because the competitors (particularly, as of late: DeepSeek-R1 and OpenAI’s “o” sequence of fashions.”)
Altman himself took to Musk’s social community X to dismiss the concept of Musk buying OpenAI, writing: “no thanks however we’ll purchase twitter for $9.74 billion if you would like,” to which Musk responded with another post calling Altman “Rip-off Altman.”
Whereas some journalists have suggested that Musk’s bid might have the impact of complicating OpenAI’s neat plans to spin off the for-profit arm from the non-profit holding firm — for which the worth was urged to be lower than $40 billion — the reality is that OpenAI’s final funding spherical valued it at $157 billion, so each costs are in the end a lot decrease than the present crop of buyers have purchased into the corporate for.
Not out of the query
But it’s hardly out of the query that Musk may succeed with this takeover bid. In spite of everything, his bid to take over Twitter (and in the end change the identify to X) was additionally deemed as a longshot by some within the press — till it occurred for actual, and arguably modified the course of historical past by selling extra posts from conservative and freewheeling influencers and paying subscribers over the verified journalists of yore, influencing the 2024 election and a myriad different world occasions and particular person perceptions/worldviews.
Which additionally raises the query, particularly in mild of his controversial Nazi-like salute on Trump’s second inauguration day and basic help for far-right politics globally: If Musk does reach taking on OpenAI, would you proceed to make use of its merchandise (ChatGPT, Sora, DALL-E 3, its APIs and numerous different fashions and companies) or change to a different AI mannequin supplier? In spite of everything, a lot of individuals and organizations left X for competing brief social posting platforms BlueSky and Threads within the wake of Musk’s takeover and basic strikes to help Trump and far-right politicians.
I must also hasten to level out that whereas Musk has promoted viewpoints and political positions I personally discover detestable, his Grok AI mannequin has enabled a way more freewheeling and freeform expression than most different competing AI fashions, particularly almost about picture era — it’s how I created the likeness of Altman on the high of this submit, for instance. This can be a laudable place in my eyes, and may point out {that a} takeover of OpenAI would end in much less censored/restricted fashions, which I help.
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