Source: FT Chinese
OpenAI’s Sam Altman is grappling with an unpredictable force that threatens his ambition to turn the startup into a trillion-dollar business: Elon Musk.
Since Donald Trump was elected U.S. president in November, executives at the developer of ChatGPT have been preparing to deal with the incoming U.S. administration — a process made more complicated by Musk’s emergence as a key adviser to the president-elect.
OpenAI has been among Musk’s rivals, trying to predict how the billionaire will use his newfound influence in Washington, from pushing for new regulations against the company to influencing the awarding of lucrative government contracts that could boost the development of Musk’s own artificial intelligence startup, xAI.
“I have a very strong belief that Elon will do the right thing,” Altman told the New York Times conference last week. “It would be extremely un-American for someone to have enormous political power, as Elon has, and to use that power to hurt competitors and benefit his own business.”
Trump himself has said Musk would put the country’s interests ahead of his company’s, while Musk has said on his social media platform X that rivals are “right” to expect him to be magnanimous.
“No one will believe that,” said a lawyer who has incurred Musk’s wrath.
Since co-founding OpenAI in 2015, Musk’s relationship with Altman has been fractured. The Tesla boss has called Altman “Tricky Sam” and filed a lawsuit against him and OpenAI alleging “Shakespearean levels of deception” while seeking to cancel its multibillion-dollar commercial partnership with Microsoft.
Musk is “one of a kind,” according to Chris Lehane, OpenAI’s head of policy. Lehane, a political veteran who has helped companies such as Airbnb and the Coinbase exchange navigate complex regulatory hurdles, added that OpenAI's approach is to "control what we can control."
According to Lehane, the company has highlighted its importance to Trump's agenda in three areas: boosting U.S. competitiveness, particularly against China, rebuilding the economy and strengthening national security. Altman has also donated $1 million of his own money to Trump's inauguration fund.
"At the end of the day, every American, in and out of government, wants to put America's interests first," Lehane said. "This administration talked about the need for an American-led AI victory during the campaign and since. If you want that to happen, then OpenAI has to be a part of it."
OpenAI has been at the forefront of artificial intelligence companies since launching ChatGPT in November 2022. It is currently adjusting its structure in part to attract more outside investment to stay ahead of the curve - a move that Musk's lawsuit claims betrays OpenAI's original intentions.
OpenAI hit back in a blog post on Friday, claiming that Musk himself had pushed for a similar structure when he was co-chairman in 2017. The company said Musk “should be competing in the marketplace, not in court.”
Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, a Microsoft board member and OpenAI’s biggest backer, said he was “really concerned” that Musk’s hostility toward Altman would manifest in Trump’s AI policies.
“Obviously, people of integrity and character would say, ‘Look, since I’m involved in these lawsuits and so forth, I should distance myself from the workings of the government on these things,’ ” Hoffman said.
He added that it “suggests potentially dangerous shortsightedness and a dangerous conflict of interest” if Musk blurred the lines between his personal views and the larger geopolitical rules and structures.
People close to Musk say he has principles and will not use his new role to impose onerous regulation on OpenAI. Given that his remit as co-chair of the new US "unit of government efficiency" is to find ways to cut regulation, that wouldn't make sense.
"You'll see a lot of red tape cut," said one person who has invested in Musk and Altman's companies. "OpenAI will have a streamlined process to quickly get their data centers up and running. The same will apply to all competitors," they added.
However, according to an investor in one of Musk's companies, Musk could use his central position in the incoming administration to boost xAI's development. "The US government is the largest employer in the United States," the person said. "With Musk's expanded network of customers, will the government become a big customer for xAI?"
Hoffman, a former OpenAI board member, speculated that Musk might use his position to slow down the development of xAI's competitors.
“You can do all of these things if you’re trying to give one company an edge over others when it comes to implementing government policy,” he said, adding that doing so would be “frankly very destructive. It’s bad for the industry and it’s bad for American society.”
For now, the biggest challenge OpenAI faces from Musk is direct competition from xAI, rather than political influence.
“With Elon Musk’s company, they probably have the largest proprietary dataset in the world. They have satellite imagery from Starlink, videos from Tesla cars, data from X. They’re working on it seriously,” said one person who has worked with both entrepreneurs.
xAI’s latest chatbot, Grok-2, was released in August and is already able to compete with similar models from leading tech groups, and follows closely on the heels of Google’s Gemini, OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Meta’s Llama.
Earlier this year, Musk began developing a supercomputer called Colossus in Memphis, Tennessee. By September, it was live and being used to train xAI’s large language model, Grok, a competitor to OpenAI’s latest generative AI system, GPT-4. “From start to finish, it took 122 days,” Musk wrote on X.
The data center houses more than 100,000 Nvidia H100 graphics processing units, more than any other single AI computing cluster. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in October that “there is only one person in the world who can do this,” calling Giant “without a doubt the fastest supercomputer cluster on the planet.”
Aside from tormenting Altman, “the thing he’s most proud of is the speed with which they’ve rolled out Giant,” said a large investor in Musk’s companies, including SpaceX and xAI. “No one has the same computing power in AI, which is a big deal, but there’s a lot to be determined.”
While Musk has newfound strength from his proximity to the president-elect, investors say the biggest threats to OpenAI remain his leadership in overlapping businesses, his vast personal wealth and the ruthless work culture he has instilled in his companies.
They say: "Elon is able to achieve things in the real world that others cannot."
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