Frenemies Sam Altman of OpenAI and Elon Musk are having a public spat.
Kevin Dietsch / Getty / WPA Pool
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman just posted a sick burn on Elon Musk’s new AI.”Grok” is xAI’s new ChatGPT rival, which puts “humor” into its text output.Altman and Musk cofounded OpenAI but later had a falling out.
The frenemyship between OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Elon Musk just got a little spicier.
Last week, the Tesla CEO announced xAI’s new project, “Grok,” a ChatGPT rival that infuses crass humor and is trained on recent posts on X, the company formerly known as Twitter.
Altman on Thursday night posted a screenshot of the latest version of OpenAI’s platform, which now allows you to create customized versions of ChatGPT called GPTs.
In his version, he instructs it:
Be a chatbot that answers questions with cringey boomer humor in an awkward shock-to-get-laughs sort of way.
ChatGPT Builder replies:
Great, the chatbot is set up! Its name is Grok. How do you like the name, or would you prefer something else?
GPTs can save a lot of effort: pic.twitter.com/VFIrGzPuMN
— Sam Altman (@sama) November 10, 2023
Ouch.
There’s bad blood between Altman and Musk, once former friends. Musk and Altman, along with others including Peter Thiel, founded OpenAI as a non-profit in 2015, with a goal of advancing open sourced research on artificial intelligence. According to Walter Isaacson’s biography of Musk, Musk was upset when OpenAI, under Altman, transitioned away from a pure non-profit and partnered with Microsoft.
It was also perhaps no coincidence that the announcement of Grok happened just days before OpenAI’s highly-anticipated DevDay event this week, where the custom ChatGPTs were announced.
