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There’s virtually by no means a uninteresting second on the AI beat, and right this moment was no exception: The Wall Road 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 objective 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 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 pressure for good it as soon as was,” Musk stated in an announcement offered by his legal professional 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 enterprise 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 a large AI mannequin coaching supercluster of graphics processing models (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 fast and hefty funding in spinning up a competitor — the rival Grok chatbot baked into social community X, and the underlying Grok-2 giant multimodal mannequin and utility programming interface (API) for third get together software program builders — Musk just isn’t succeeding at successful as many customers as he and his collaborators may like.
It might additionally counsel 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, as of late: DeepSeek-R1 and OpenAI’s “o” sequence of fashions.”)
Altman himself took to Musk’s social community X to dismiss the thought of Musk buying OpenAI, writing: “no thanks however we are going to purchase twitter for $9.74 billion if you would like,” to which Musk responded with one other put up calling Altman “Rip-off Altman.”
Whereas some journalists have urged 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 value 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 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 may succeed with this takeover bid. In any case, his bid to take over Twitter (and finally 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 international occasions and particular person perceptions/worldviews.
Which additionally raises the query, particularly in gentle of his controversial Nazi-like salute on Trump’s second inauguration day and basic assist for far-right politics globally: If Musk does reach taking up OpenAI, would you proceed to make use of its merchandise (ChatGPT, Sora, DALL-E 3, its APIs and numerous different fashions and providers) or swap to a different AI mannequin supplier? In any case, plenty 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 assist 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 may point out {that a} takeover of OpenAI would end in much less censored/restricted fashions, which I assist.
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