A war of words between Elon Musk and Sam Altman escalated\u00a0on social media Thursday, as two of the most powerful men in tech sparred over their rival artificial intelligence initiatives.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The latest exchange began after OpenAI, where Altman is CEO, was revealed as a key player in Stargate, the AI infrastructure project President Donald Trump announced this week that is coming with a massive investment push.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey don\u2019t actually have the money,\u201d Musk wrote in a long post on his social platform, X, about the new venture. It was not immediately clear whom Musk was initially referring to, but he soon followed up, naming SoftBank, Stargate\u2019s main financial backer.<\/p>\n
\u201cSoftBank has well under $10B secured. I have that on good authority,\u201d he said, without elaborating. Neither Musk nor his electronic car company Tesla have publicized any formal links. \u00a0<\/strong>\u00a0<\/p>\n Altman responded praising Musk \u2014 \u201cI genuinely respect your accomplishments and think you are the most inspiring entrepreneur of our time,\u201d he wrote on X \u2014 but he called his SoftBank claim wrong.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI realize what is great for the country isn\u2019t always what\u2019s optimal for your companies, but in your new role i hope you\u2019ll mostly put [America] first,\u201d he added, using an American flag emoji.<\/p>\n In remarks to reporters Thursday, Trump weighed in on the dispute but gave no indication that Altman\u2019s or OpenAI\u2019s status on the project were threatened.<\/p>\n Without mentioning Altman by name, Trump mentioned Musk while referring to \u2018one of the people he happens to hate.\u2019<\/p>\n \u2018But I have certain hatreds of people, too,\u2019 he said.<\/p>\n The spat has its roots in a pending lawsuit filed by Musk, <\/strong>a co-founder of OpenAI, <\/strong>over control of the company; it was rekindled after Trump\u2019s announcement this week that OpenAI would be part of the $500 billion Stargate initiative designed to make the United States a world leader in AI.<\/p>\n Late Wednesday and into Thursday, Musk continued to hammer Altman, repeatedly citing posts during Trump\u2019s 2016 presidential run in which Altman appeared to denounce Trump.\u00a0<\/p>\n By 8:30 p.m., Altman posted that he\u2019d recently had a change of heart about the president: \u201cwatching @potus more carefully recently has really changed my perspective on him (i wish i had done more of my own thinking\u201d he said in part. \u201ci\u2019m not going to agree with him on everything, but i think he will be incredible for the country in many ways!\u201d<\/p>\n On Thursday morning, Altman posted, responding to Musk: \u201cjust one more mean tweet and then maybe you\u2019ll love yourself\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n The tit-for-tat between Musk and Altman is a sign of both the struggle within the tech community to curry favor with Trump and how the AI race is driving the push for tech dominance. If putting out new, consumer-friendly devices was once the way for a tech company to gain power, the struggle to create the most advanced form of AI has almost completely taken over.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n The situation also points to the tension of Musk\u2019s role as both a top Trump adviser and one of the world\u2019s most powerful \u2014 and combative \u2014 business moguls. Musk has his own interest in AI through the X, which debuted Grok, its rival to OpenAI\u2019s ChatGPT, in November.<\/p>\n The simmering Altman-Musk feud goes back years, well before Musk\u2019s emergence in the U.S. political scene and even before the recent explosion of artificial intelligence technology. Companies have rushed to invest in AI infrastructure and development, so much so that it has accounted for a significant part of recent U.S. economic growth. A Goldman Sachs paper published in June, well before the announcement of the Stargate project,\u00a0projected that AI capital expenditure could top $1 trillion.<\/p>\n OpenAI had generally been considered the leader in AI development, though it faces major competition from other startups, as well as most major tech giants that are believed to have closed the gap. That competition has made securing investments and partnerships all the more important in large part because of the sizable hardware and energy needs required to hone the models at the core of advanced AI.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n A war of words between Elon Musk and Sam Altman escalated\u00a0on social media Thursday, as two of the most powerful men in tech sparred over their rival artificial intelligence initiatives.\u00a0 The latest exchange began after OpenAI, where Altman is CEO, was revealed as a key player in Stargate, the AI infrastructure project President Donald Trump […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":14317,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14316","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14316","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14316"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14316\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14317"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14316"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14316"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14316"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}