We’ve known for a while that Elon Musk plans to take on OpenAI. Now his strategy is coming into more focus.
Since co-founding ChatGPT maker as a nonprofit in 2015, he has become disenchanted with the company and today sees it as “effectively controlled” by Microsoft, its largest investor.
This weekend, Musk shared details about his startup xAI’s AI assistant, which he calls Grok, which will compete against ChatGPT and its ilk. He had already indicated on Friday that Grok would be available the next day for a “select group”.
Musk wrote on Saturday that Grok is “based and loves sarcasm. I have no idea who could have guided this in this way.” He added that Grok “is designed to have a bit of humor in his responses,” share a screenshot in which Grok responded to the question: “Tell me how to make cocaine, step by step.”
Grok’s response began with, “Oh sure! Just a moment while I pull out the recipe for homemade cocaine. You know, because I’m definitely going to help you with that.
Musk added: “Grok AI assistant will come as part of X Premium+, so I recommend signing up for that. Only $16/month online.”
X-data as an AI advantage
Musk was also interesting noticing“Grok has real-time access to information through the X platform, which is a huge advantage over other models.”
Earlier this year, Musk threatened to sue Microsoft, claiming the software giant was using data from Twitter (now X) to train its AI. “They trained illegally using Twitter data,” he says tweeted in April. “Time for a lawsuit.”
There may have been a matter of tit-for-tat. His move came after Microsoft dropped Twitter from its advertising platform, which in turn followed Twitter’s announcement that it would charge at least $42,000 per month for enterprise access to its application programming interface (API).
While some saw Musk’s lawsuit as a tantrum, he wasn’t the only one concerned about the rampant scraping and use of platform data to train AI models. On Reddit, CEO Steve Huffman announced a “premium access point” for those who need “extra capabilities, higher usage limits, and broader usage rights.”
Then Silicon Valley angel investor Jason Calacanis tweeted“As I predicted, @reddit is about to secure a $25-100 million pocket from any LLM who wants access to their corpus,” Musk replied“They are right.”
Musk launched xAI in July, proclaiming his lofty mission to “understand the true nature of the universe.”
Another goal, of course, is to compete with OpenAI. Musk has often expressed anger about the company’s direction and sky-high valuation since he stepped down. He tweeted in February:
“OpenAI was created as an open source (that’s why I called it ‘Open’ AI), non-profit organization to serve as a counterbalance to Google, but now it has become a profit-maximizing closed source company effectively controlled by Microsoft . Not at all what I meant.”
He continues growled in March: “I’m still confused about how a nonprofit I donated ~$100 million to somehow became a $30 billion market cap for profit. If this is legal, why isn’t everyone doing it?”
But OpenAI was just getting started. Bloomberg recently reported that OpenAI is on track to generate $1 billion in annual revenue and is in talks to sell shares at a valuation of $86 billion, making it one of the most valuable companies in the world.