Business News – Dec 23, 2024

1 - Sam Altman reckons with a growing threat to OpenAI: Elon Musk

Tesla chief’s influence over Donald Trump encourages ChatGPT-maker into patriotic pitch to incoming administration

OpenAI’s Sam Altman is reckoning with an unpredictable force that threatens his ambition of transforming the start-up into a trillion-dollar company: Elon Musk.

Since Donald Trump was elected president in November, executives at the ChatGPT-maker have been preparing to deal with the incoming US administration — a process complicated by Musk’s emergence as a pivotal confidant of the president-elect.

OpenAI has been among Musk’s rivals who are trying to anticipate how the billionaire may use his new vantage point in Washington, from pushing for new regulations that target the company to influencing the award of lucrative government contracts that could boost Musk’s own artificial intelligence start-up xAI.

“I believe pretty strongly that Elon will do the right thing and that it would be profoundly un-American to use political power, to the degree that Elon has it, to hurt your competitors and advantage your own businesses,” Altman told a New York Times conference last week.

Trump himself has said Musk would put the national interest ahead of his companies, while Musk said on his social media platform X that rivals were “right” to expect him to be magnanimous.

“No one believes that for a second,” said a lawyer who has incurred Musk’s wrath in the past.

Having founded OpenAI together in 2015, the relationship between Musk and Altman has collapsed. The Tesla chief has described Altman as “swindly Sam” and filed lawsuits against him and OpenAI accusing them of “deceit of Shakespearean proportions” while seeking to void its multibillion-dollar commercial partnership with Microsoft.

Musk is “unique”, according to OpenAI’s policy chief Chris Lehane, a political veteran who has helped companies such as Airbnb and Coinbase navigate tricky regulatory obstacles. OpenAI’s approach would be to “control what we can control”, he added.

The company was emphasising its importance to the Trump agenda on three fronts, according to Lehane: boosting US competitiveness, particularly against China, rebuilding the economy and bolstering national security. Altman is also donating $1mn of his own money to Trump’s inaugural fund.

“At the end of the day, every American, in or out of government [is] going to want to put the interest of the US first,” Lehane said. “This administration talked over the campaign and since about the imperative of . . . US-led AI prevailing. If you want that to happen then OpenAI is going to have to be in the mix.”

OpenAI has been at the front of the pack of AI companies since launching ChatGPT in November 2022. It is currently changing its structure, in part to accommodate greater external investment in a bid to remain ahead — a move which Musk’s lawsuit alleges betrays OpenAI’s original mission.

On Friday, OpenAI fired back in a blog post, claiming Musk himself pushed for a similar structure in 2017, when he was still co-chair. Musk “should be competing in the marketplace rather than the courtroom,” the company said.

Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn and board member at Microsoft, OpenAI’s biggest backer, said he was “certainly worried” that Musk’s animosity towards Altman would play out in Trump’s AI policies.

“Obviously [someone with] integrity and character would say, look, since I’m involved in these kinds of lawsuits and so forth, I should keep myself distinct from the operation of government in these things,” said Hoffman.

Should Musk blur his personal views and larger geopolitical rules and structures, it “portends potentially dangerous myopias and dangerous conflicts of interest”, he added.

People close to Musk said he was too principled to use his new role to target OpenAI with onerous regulation, and it made no sense to do so given his remit as the co-chair of a new US “department of government efficiency” is

Episode 3614 - December 24 - Tiếng Anh - Tin Kinh doanh – Ngày 23 tháng 12, 2024 - Vina Technology at AI time

Vina Technology at AI time - Công nghệ Việt Nam thời AI

Episode 3614 - December 24 - Tiếng Anh - Tin Kinh doanh – Ngày 23 tháng 12, 2024 - Vina Technology at AI time