There’s virtually by no means a uninteresting second on the AI beat, and in the present day was no exception: The Wall Avenue Journal this afternoon reported {that a} consortium of personal traders led by the world’s wealthiest man, the multi-company proudly owning Elon Musk, had offered a bid of $97.4 billion to OpenAI’s non-profit board of administrators to accumulate 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 said aim of wanting to accumulate 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 authentic founding mission assertion of delivering AI advantages and synthetic normal intelligence (AGI) for all.
“It’s time for OpenAI to return to the open-source, safety-focused force for good it once was,” Musk stated in an announcement supplied by his legal professional to the Journal. “We will make sure that happens.”
The takeover bid can be private for Musk, who after co-founding and bankrolling the corporate in 2015 alongside Altman and 9 others, determined to exit the enterprise in 2018, solely to show into one in every of its largest 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 items (GPUs) in Memphis, Tennessee, referred to as Colossus.
Musk’s double-speak
But the bid to regulate 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 software programming interface (API) for third occasion software program builders — Musk isn’t succeeding at profitable as many customers as he and his collaborators would possibly like.
It could additionally recommend that the Grok-3 mannequin — reportedly in coaching, and which pseudonymous AI rumor accounts on X have hyped as industry-leading — is maybe not as superior or prepared because the competitors (particularly, nowadays: DeepSeek-R1 and OpenAI’s “o” collection of fashions.”)
Altman himself took to Musk’s social community X to dismiss the thought of Musk buying OpenAI, writing: “no thank you but we will buy twitter for $9.74 billion if you want,” to which Musk responded with one other put up calling Altman “Scam Altman.”
Whereas some journalists have steered that Musk’s bid could 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 steered to be lower than $40 billion — the reality is that OpenAI’s final funding spherical valued it at $157 billion, so each costs are finally a lot decrease than the present crop of traders have purchased into the corporate for.
Not out of the query
But it’s hardly out of the query that Musk might succeed with this takeover bid. In any case, his bid to take over Twitter (and finally change the title 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 international 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 normal help for far-right politics globally: If Musk does achieve 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 swap to a different AI mannequin supplier? In any case, quite a lot of folks and organizations left X for competing brief social posting platforms BlueSky and Threads within the wake of Musk’s takeover and normal 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 on the subject of picture technology — it’s how I created the likeness of Altman on the high of this put up, for instance. This can be a laudable place in my eyes, and would possibly point out {that a} takeover of OpenAI would lead to much less censored/restricted fashions, which I help.
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