Elon Musk’s xAI goes after OpenAI
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. An underappreciated force behind great technological change is intense—and petty—rivalry. In the “war of the currents" in the late 19th century, Thomas Edison electrocuted stray animals to discredit Nikola Tesla.
A century later Steve Jobs traded insults with Bill Gates during a battle between Apple and Microsoft. Even “Silicon Valley," a satirical HBO series, starts with a feud—and the priceless quip: “These are billionaires, Richard. Humiliating each other is worth more to them than we will make in a lifetime." In the world of generative artificial intelligence (AI), the scrap between Elon Musk and Sam Altman is in the same league.
It is both silly and captivating. Silly because they insult each other, try to discredit each other’s chatbots and fight over who meant what almost a decade ago when they co-founded OpenAI . Captivating because, fuelled by grievance, Mr Musk has created xAI, maker of a series of large language models (LLMs) called Grok.
It has its sights set on OpenAI, now run by Mr Altman, which became wildly successful with the release of ChatGPT two years ago. While OpenAI was last valued at $157bn, xAI, which is less than two years old, is already reported to be worth $50bn. xAI is desperate to catch up.
In September it fired up the world’s biggest supercomputer in Memphis, built in record time with 100,000 of Nvidia’s graphics processing units (GPUs), at an estimated cost of $4.5bn. Mr Musk promised to double the size within a few months. xAI is raising money hand over fist: $5bn in its current round, according to the Wall Street Journal, on top of $6bn in May (OpenAI has raised $6.6bn this year).
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