• Sam Altman isn't done firing shots at Elon Musk.
• The OpenAI CEO said the Tesla boss was "clearly a bully" who likes to pick fights with rivals in an interview with The Free Press.
• Musk is in a lengthy legal battle with OpenAI and Altman, and refiled a lawsuit against both earlier this year.

Sam Altman and Elon Musk once started OpenAI together — but now their relationship is a lot more complicated.

In an interview with The Free Press on Thursday, Altman said his OpenAI cofounder was "clearly a bully" and said that Musk's high-profile feud with his former company had become a "sideshow."

Since stepping down from OpenAI in 2018, Musk has been highly critical of the AI startup and CEO Altman.

The Tesla boss refiled a lawsuit in August, arguing he had been "deceived" into starting the company by Altman and fellow cofounder Greg Brockman.

Musk has also asked a federal court to block OpenAI from transitioning into a for-profit entity, with OpenAI firing back by releasing a cache of emails showing Musk pushed for the AI startup to be for-profit while working at the company.

In the interview, Altman described Musk as a "legendary entrepreneur" who did a lot to help OpenAI in its early days.

"He's also clearly a bully, and he's also someone who clearly likes to get into fights," added the OpenAI CEO, pointing to the billionaire's high-profile spats with Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates.

Altman also said he believes much of Musk's animosity is rooted in OpenAI's recent success and the fact that he now runs a direct competitor.

Musk announced xAI, his own AI startup, last year, and the company has since released several versions of its chatbot Grok.

"Everything we're doing, I believe Elon would be happy about if he were in control of OpenAI," said Altman.

"He left when he thought we were on a trajectory to certainly fail, and also when we wouldn't do something where he had total control over the company," he added.

Altman's comments come as Musk prepares to occupy an increasingly prominent role in the second Trump administration. Though Musk will have an influential political position, Altman said he did not believe Musk would use his power to go after his rivals.

"I think there are people who will really be a jerk on Twitter who will still not abuse the system of the country," he said.

OpenAI and Musk did not respond to requests for comment, sent outside normal working hours.

• Big Tech companies and CEOs are already lining up six-figure donations to Donald Trump's inauguration.
• Amazon, Sam Altman, and Meta are each prepared to donate $1 million.
• There are virtually no limits on inaugural donations, meaning Big Tech companies can cut massive checks.

Big Tech companies and the moguls behind them are preparing to make six-figure donations to President-elect Donald Trump's inaugural committee.

Jeff Bezos' Amazon, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and Mark Zuckerberg's Meta have all been reported to have made or will make $1 million to the outfit tasked with planning and organizing Trump's triumphant return to power.

"The financing of inaugurations is really a cesspool when it comes to campaign financing," Craig Holman, a lobbyist for government watchdog Public Citizen, told Business Insider.

Holman said there are few, if any, limits to inaugural donations, and what makes them particularly appealing is that megadonors and CEOs don't have to worry about picking the loser.

"Unlike financing a campaign, when you don't know for sure who is going to win, here in the inauguration, you've got the winner," he said. "So corporations and other special interests just throw money at them at the feet of the president with the hope of currying favor."

Jeff Hauser, executive director of the Revolving Door Project, a public interest group, said donations to the inaugural committee are less likely to irk the opposition.

"They are frequently a mechanism for entities that sit out elections to get good with the incoming administration," he said.

Trump's 2017 inaugural set a record, raking in roughly $107 million. Las Vegas Sands CEO Sheldon Adelson donated $5 million, the largest single donation. AT&T gave just over $2 million. For many in Washington, it was a time to make nice with an incoming president that few thought would win the 2016 race.

This time, Trump's inaugural offers one final major opportunity for CEOs to curry influence with the president-elect at his peak.

Since he'll be term-limited, the next major fundraising opportunity likely won't come until Trump begins preparations for a presidential library (should that even occur). At that point, companies will have missed their window to make a final impression before mergers and acquisitions.

2017 Trump inaugural donors benefited greatly

Playing ball can have major benefits. OpenSecrets found in 2018 that "of the 63 federal contractors that donated to the inauguration, more than half won multimillion-dollar bids" from the federal government later on.

Foreign donors can't contribute to a president-elect's inaugural committee, and the committee must publicly disclose details about donations over $200 within 90 days of Inauguration Day. Otherwise, there are few limits on what individuals or corporations can give, and inaugural committees are not required to explain how they spend the money.

Some presidents, especially Obama in 2009, have imposed voluntary restrictions on donations. Obama refused to accept corporate donations or individual contributions over $50,000 for his historic first inauguration, though he later lifted those limits for his reelection celebration.

Hauser said donations will allow corporations to prepare for an especially transactional period.

"I think that corporations with an agenda in Trump's Washington, be it offense, like getting new contracts, or defense, like avoiding negative federal scrutiny, are going to spend millions of dollars in Washington to either make or protect billions in the real economy," Hauser said.

Tech companies are under the microscope.

Amazon, Google, and Meta have all faced antitrust concerns. Republican lawmakers have frequently grilled Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg over Facebook's decision to limit sharing the New York Post's initial report on Hunter Biden's laptop ahead of the 2020 election. Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, donated to help election officials during the COVID-19 pandemic, enraging some on the right, while Trump repeatedly lit into Amazon founder Jeff Bezos for The Washington Post's coverage of his first administration. Amazon sued the Trump administration after Microsoft was awarded a $10 billion cloud computing contract over them, alleging that Trump's animus for Bezos sunk their chances.

Bezos and Zuckerberg have since taken steps to repair their relationships with the Trump world. Zuckerberg has expressed regret over Facebook's decision to censor some posts about COVID-19. He also pledged not to donate to help election officials. Bezos intervened when The Post's editorial board was ready to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris.

Bezos also recently said Trump seemed "calmer than he was the first time and more settled."

"You've probably grown in the last eight years," Bezos said at The New York Times DealBook Summit in December. "He has, too."

Altman has been entangled in a legal battle with his OpenAI cofounder Elon Musk, who is set to be an influential figure in the Trump administration.

In a statement about his donation, Altman said, "President Trump will lead our country into the age of AI, and I am eager to support his efforts to ensure America stays ahead."

Representatives for Amazon, Meta, and Trump's inaugural did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

To get a taste of what may be in store, one only needs to look at what happened at President Joe Biden's inauguration.

A leaked fundraising memo showed that large donations netted individuals and organizations various perks, including opportunities to meet Biden, receive private briefings from top campaign officials, and "preferred viewing" for the virtual inauguration.

All of those benefits came amid pandemic precautions. Trump's party will have no such limits.

• Mark Zuckerberg's Meta urged California to halt OpenAI's transition to a for-profit company.
• In doing so, Zuckerberg sided with his occasional nemesis, Elon Musk, who also wants to stop OpenAI.
• It seems the two tech billionaires have finally found some common ground.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and X owner Elon Musk have long-standing beef about everything from artificial intelligence to how they run their respective social media platforms.

While that feud has lasted for the better part of a decade — and has even threatened to get physical — the two tech billionaires now agree on at least one thing: their competitor, OpenAI, should remain a nonprofit.

Zuckerberg's Meta asked the California attorney general on Friday to stop OpenAI from becoming a for-profit company. Meta accused Sam Altman's company of "taking advantage" of its status as a nonprofit to raise billions.

"OpenAI wants to change its status while retaining all of the benefits that enabled it to reach the point it has today. That is wrong. OpenAI should not be allowed to flout the law by taking and reappropriating assets it built as a charity and using them for potentially enormous private gains," Meta said in the letter to California Attorney General Rob Bonta.

OpenAI is one of Meta's biggest competitors in the AI tech race.

"Failing to hold OpenAI accountable for its choice to form as a nonprofit could lead to a proliferation of similar startup ventures that are notionally charitable until they are potentially profitable," Meta wrote in the letter.

With that, Zuckerberg sided with Musk, who is engaged in an ongoing legal fight to prevent OpenAI from becoming a for-profit.

Musk, one of 11 OpenAI cofounders who split from the company early on, launched a second bid in November to stop OpenAI from making the transition, asking a court for an injunction against the company.

The injunction request also argues that OpenAI and Microsoft, the largest corporate investor in the AI startup, have worked together to build a "for-profit monopoly," engaging in anti-competitive behavior that also targets xAI, Musk's artificial intelligence venture.

OpenAI has fought back. On Friday, it published a blog post titled "Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit." The post includes a series of emails and messages between Musk and other cofounders, including Altman, going back as far as November 2015, a month before the company was founded.

In one of those emails, Musk responded to Altman's proposal to start a Delaware-based nonprofit: "Also, the structure doesn't seem optimal," Musk wrote.

Musk left the organization in 2018 in part because he believed OpenAI's "probability of success was 0," according to an OpenAI blog post from March. Musk has accused OpenAI of straying from its original mission to develop an artificial general intelligence that is safe and benefits humanity.

Almost a decade after its founding as a nonprofit, OpenAI is now eyeing the switch to a for-profit venture to generate more investor capital. In October, the company announced a $6.6 billion funding round, raising OpenAI's valuation to $157 billion. That investment, however, comes with a stipulation that OpenAI become a for-profit within two years.

Meanwhile, Meta said it plans to pour as much as $37 billion on infrastructure costs alone this year, largely related to AI. Musk's xAI told investors last month that it secured $5 billion in funding.

Musk and spokespeople for Meta and OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment.

• OpenAI published Elon Musk's old emails in a blog post on Friday.
• The AI company released its version of a timeline of events amid a brewing legal feud with Musk.
• In a 2015 email, Musk said OpenAI's nonprofit structure didn't seem "optimal."

OpenAI responded to co-founder Elon Musk on Friday with a new legal filing and a pointed blog post featuring the billionaire's old emails in which he pushed for the AI startup to be for-profit.

The emails and filing are the latest blows thrown in the legal feud between OpenAI and Musk. Last month, Musk asked a federal court to stop OpenAI from moving to a for-profit business structure. In the last year, Musk has twice sued OpenAI in an effort to stop the startup from adopting a more traditional business structure.

In a Friday afternoon legal filing, OpenAI accused Musk of trying to hobble the AI startup while he perfects his competitor, xAI.

The company also detailed its version of a timeline of events in a post titled "Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for profit," saying that the Tesla CEO "not only wanted, but actually created a for-profit" structure in 2017.

The emails stand in contrast to Musk's more recent public stance against OpenAI transitioning from a not-for-profit company to a for-profit organization.

Musk did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment.

In one image of a November 2015 email, Musk wrote to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman that the startup's then-non-profit structure "doesn't seem optimal," according to the post.

OpenAI wrote in the blog that the company and Musk both agreed that a for-profit was the next step for the startup in the fall of 2017. But when Musk failed to win majority equity, OpenAI accused him of walking away and saying the company would "fail."

Musk left the OpenAI board in 2018, but his lawyers have said he continued contributing to the company until 2020.

"Now that OpenAI is the leading AI research lab and Elon runs a competing AI company, he's asking the court to stop us from effectively pursuing our mission," OpenAI wrote this week.

Musk announced xAI, his competitor to OpenAI, last year and has since released the Grok chatbot.

OpenAI also published Musk's private emails in March after Musk sued OpenAI and Altman.

In a November 2015 email published earlier this year, Musk said the company should say it was starting with a funding commitment of $1 billion, promising to cover "whatever anyone else doesn't provide."

OpenAI also accused Musk at the time of wanting the startup to merge with Tesla and be its "cash cow."

Musk's most recent filing is his fourth attempt in less than a year to "reframe his claims," OpenAI said in the blog post.

"You can't sue your way to AGI," the company wrote in the blog post. "We have great respect for Elon's accomplishments and gratitude for his early contributions to OpenAI, but he should be competing in the marketplace rather than the courtroom."

• It's not new for rich people and big companies to donate to presidential inaugurations.
• Something about watching tech titans like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos do it seems different.
• That's at least in part because it's so public — the money is less important than the message.

First, Mark Zuckerberg. Then, Jeff Bezos. Now, Sam Altman. They're all donating $1 million to Donald Trump's inauguration fund.

Expect more tech titans to follow. Google CEO Sundar Pichai was reportedly flying to Mar-a-Lago to meet with Trump this week. I wouldn't be shocked to see a $1 million pledge coming shortly after. (Google declined to comment about any of the above.)

You can see it playing out in real time. Zuckerberg's initial donation was news; each subsequent one just confirms it as the cost of doing business. At some point, the news will be when you hear that some tech giant is not forking over $1 million to help fund Trump's multiday party next month.

Quick context: It is not unusual for big companies and very rich people to donate lots of money to presidential inaugurations, whether via cash, in-kind contributions, or both.

While US elections themselves have (some) rules about the amount of money people and companies can spend on candidates, there's no cap on what they can spend on inaugural committees. The only restrictions are that the money can't come from foreign nationals and that the donations eventually have to be disclosed.

Which is why we can see it's also not unheard of for Big Tech companies to make inaugural donations. Microsoft kicked in $500,000 for Trump's first inauguration in 2017; Google spent $285,000. Those two companies also contributed to Joe Biden's 2021 inauguration, along with Uber, which spent $1 million.

It's also worth noting that the sums we are talking about here don't even qualify as rounding errors for companies this size. Zuckerberg's Meta makes about $174 million in profit every day. Amazon does about $110 million. A million bucks just doesn't register. (The Amazon and Meta donations are coming directly from the companies, not their founders; Altman, who has a reported net worth of $1.1 billion, has said he's making his donation personally.)

So what makes this round of donations newsworthy?

Yes, in some cases, Trump has tangled with the companies or the leaders in question — he famously threatened to jail Zuckerberg earlier this year for theoretical election interference, and he's long railed about Amazon's founder, Bezos, as well as the Bezos-owned Washington Post.

There's also the fact that while Trump and his allies continue to insist that they want to cut regulations, they also insist that they'll be cracking down on Big Tech. That context makes the donations seem even more transactional than other rich person/corporate donations.

But the main reason this is news is … because it's news. News that's out in public, that is.

In the past, these donations would eventually be disclosed in filings, but this time around, the contributors seem eager to let the world know they're doing it.

That's the telling part. The part that tells you that this time around, more tech leaders have decided that the best way to deal with Donald Trump is to say nice things about him in public, and to do nice things for him — in public. And then, they hope, they can get things from him privately.

That is, they are taking cues from Apple CEO Tim Cook, who navigated the first Trump presidency very effectively. As I've noted before: "Cook became an expert Trump manager during Trump 1.0 by letting the president do what he wanted in public, like take credit for things he didn't do, while prevailing on him privately to do things Cook wanted Trump to do — namely, exempting Apple products from tariffs." I'm assuming that will also include a $1 million donation from Apple that will get announced very shortly.

• Donald Trump is getting donations left and right from the biggest names in business.
• OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was the latest to give $1 million to Trump's inaugural fund.
• Tech leaders are angling to get or stay in his good graces and help shape his tech policy.

The latest business trend? Donating $1 million to Donald Trump's inauguration.

Business leaders across industries are trying to get on the president-elect's good side ahead of his return to the Oval Office, and some are breaking out their wallets — or their company's — to do so.

The president-elect is receiving donations to his inaugural fund from Mark Zuckerberg through Meta, Jeff Bezos through Amazon, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

Meta confirmed to BI earlier this week that it's donating $1 million to Trump's inaugural fund. Amazon told the Financial Times it's giving $1 million to the fund and will also air the inauguration on Prime Video.

OpenAI's Altman plans to kick in $1 million of his personal money to the inauguration fund, Fox News reported Friday, citing a source who works with Altman. Amazon and OpenAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment from BI.

Some of the tech leaders are trying to make peace with Trump after he repeatedly criticized them in his first four years at the White House and subsequently sued some of them. Trump has been vocal about wanting to go after Big Tech in his second term as well.

Trump's victory in November set off a chorus of CEOs publicly congratulating him — as well as taking phone calls with the president-elect and trips to Mar-a-Lago.

Trump told CNBC on Thursday that Bezos would visit him "next week" for a dinner, and The Information reported that Google CEO Sundar Pichai would also travel to meet with Trump. In its landmark antitrust case against Google, the Justice Department asked a judge to force Google to sell off Chrome, its web browser.

Zuckerberg and Trump shared dinner at Mar-a-Lago last month months after Trump had threatened to imprison Zuckerberg if reelected. Meta's president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, told reporters earlier this month that Zuckerberg "is very keen to play an active role" in Trump's tech policymaking.

Other big names in business watched Trump ring the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday, the same day he was named Time's Person of the Year.

Onlookers reportedly included Pershing Square CEO Bill Ackman, Citigroup CEO Jane Fraser, Target CEO Brian Cornell, Mastercard CEO Michael Miebach, Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon, and Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg.

• AI advances have sparked a new global race for military dominance.
• Geoffrey Hinton said that, right now, countries are working in secret to gain an advantage.
• That will change once AI becomes so intelligent it presents an existential threat, he said.

The rapid advances in AI have triggered an international race for military dominance.

Major powers are quietly integrating AI into their militaries to gain a strategic edge. However, this could change once AI becomes advanced enough to pose an existential threat to humanity, AI "godfather" and Nobel Prize winner Geoffrey Hinton says.

"On risks like lethal autonomous weapons, countries will not collaborate," Hinton said in a seminar at the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences last week. "All of the major countries that supply arms, Russia, the United States, China, Britain, Israel, and possibly Sweden, are busy making autonomous lethal weapons, and they're not gonna be slowed down, they're not gonna regulate themselves, and they're not gonna collaborate."

However, Hinton believes that will change when it becomes necessary for the human race to fight the potential threat posed by a super-intelligent form of AI.

"When these things are smarter than us — which almost all the researchers I know believe they will be, we just differ on how soon, whether it's like in five years or in 30 years — will they take over and is there anything we can do to prevent that from happening since we make them? We'll get collaboration on that because all of the countries don't want that to happen."

"The Chinese Communist Party does not want to lose power to AI," he added. They want to hold on to it."

Hinton said this collaboration could resemble the Cold War, when Russia and the United States — despite being enemies — shared a common goal to avoid nuclear war.

Citing similar concerns, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has called on world leaders to establish an "international agency" that examines the most powerful AI models and ensures "reasonable safety testing."

"I think there will come a time in the not-so-distant future, like we're not talking decades and decades from now, where frontier AI systems are capable of causing significant global harm," Altman said on the All-In podcast in May.

According to a report by Goldman Sachs, global investment in AI is expected to hit $200 billion by 2025, with the United States and China leading the military arms race.

The United States and China are already beginning to collaborate on existential threats related to AI. In November, at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Summit, President Joe Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping agreed that humans, not AI, should make decisions regarding the use of nuclear technology.

• In a lawsuit, Elon Musk alleged OpenAI overpays as part of a pattern of anticompetitive practices.
• An analysis of salary data found that both companies offered pay well above typical industry wages for some roles.
• xAI paid one worker double the industry standard wage for the role; one OpenAI worker made over three times as much.

As the artificial-intelligence industry continues to attract attention, power, and billions of dollars in funding, two major players — Elon Musk's xAI and Sam Altman's OpenAI — are locked in a contentious battle over talent. Musk filed a lawsuit in August accusing Altman's company of offering "lavish compensation" to "starve competitors."

To examine Musk's claims about salaries, Business Insider analyzed wage data from specialty visa applications for each company from 2024. While both offered compensation well above typical industry wages for the handful of roles for which data was available, OpenAI paid some of its staff an even higher premium over standard rates.

The documentation that companies must file when hiring foreign workers on specialty visas like the H-1B provides a window into otherwise private compensation data at both firms and gives rare insight into the expensive war for AI talent.

xAI is only a fraction of the size of OpenAI; the company employs about 100 workers, compared with about 3,000 at OpenAI, PitchBook reported.

xAI reported pay data for 10 worker applications, compared with OpenAI's 86 worker applications. The companies paid 37% and 87%, respectively, above the typical industry wage — or "prevailing wage" — for the roles surveyed, based on data from US Customs and Immigration Services.

The prevailing wage is determined by the Department of Labor. It represents the average wage paid to workers in a particular occupation within a defined geographic area. Employers who hire workers on specialty visas like H-1Bs must pay them at least as much as the prevailing wage.

The data found that pay for the 10 xAI roles with specialty visa applications ranged from $250,000 to $500,000. At the top end, xAI paid one worker nearly double the prevailing wage for the role of principal machine learning engineer.

Among the 86 roles with available data on specialty visa applications, OpenAI paid between $145,000 and $530,000, with one member of the company's technical staff earning more than three times the prevailing wage for the role.

In the table above, BI compared the average salary for each job title included in the USCIS data for the two companies to the average prevailing wages for those titles.

The data offers some insight into how Musk's company approaches compensation amid a legal battle that has reignited the feud between Musk and Altman.

The pair cofounded OpenAI in 2015, and Musk was one of several Silicon Valley investors to collectively pledge $1 billion to the venture. He resigned from OpenAI's board of directors in 2018, citing a potential conflict of interest due to Tesla's work with artificial intelligence.

Since then, Musk has repeatedly bashed OpenAI and Altman, saying the company is "not what I intended at all." Musk sued OpenAI and its CEO earlier this year but withdrew the lawsuit, only to file a new suit in August. In addition to claims about OpenAI's allegedly anticompetitive practices, lawyers for Musk said that he was "deceived" and "manipulated" into cofounding the company.

"This suit is the latest move in Elon Musk's increasingly blusterous campaign to harass OpenAI for his own competitive advantage," OpenAI's attorneys wrote in motion to dismiss Musk's latest lawsuit. Since launching xAI Musk "has been trying to leverage the judicial system for an edge," they added.

Musk, Altman, and representatives for xAI and OpenAI did not respond to requests for comment.

Emails between Musk, Altman, and other OpenAI workers between 2015 and 2016 showed that Musk repeatedly emphasized the importance of recruiting top AI talent.

In the exchanges, which were included as part of Musk's most recent lawsuit, Musk wrote that recruitment should be OpenAI's "most important consideration," and the company should do "whatever it takes to bring on ace talent."

In April, Musk said xAI brought over a Tesla engineer after OpenAI began "aggressively recruiting" workers from the electric-car maker. Based on a review of LinkedIn profiles, xAI has hired at least nine former OpenAI employees, including xAI cofounder Igor Babuschkin, since Musk launched xAI in 2023.

Do you work for xAI or OpenAI? Reach out to the reporter via a non-work email and device at [email protected] or 248-894-6012

• OpenAI's CFO trusts Elon Musk to prioritize the national interest despite owning a rival company.
• Musk, a Trump advisor with ties to AI czar David Sacks, has a feud with OpenAI's Sam Altman.
• Altman said last week he does not think Musk will use his political power to hurt competitors.

OpenAI trusts Elon Musk to act in good faith as the owner of a rival AI company with the ear of President-elect Donald Trump, its CFO said.

"We trust him...as a competitor, [Musk] will put first the national interest and compete appropriately," Sarah Friar, the CFO of OpenAI, said at the Reuters NEXT conference on Tuesday.

Musk is a close Trump advisor and is co-leading the advisory body DOGE alongside Vivek Ramaswamy. Musk's ally and fellow PayPal Mafia member David Sacks was recently appointed as Trump's AI and crypto czar.

After Sacks was tapped for the position, OpenAI chief Sam Altman — with whom Musk has a long-running feud — took to X to congratulate him on the role. Musk responded with a laughing emoji.

Friar's comments follow Altman's remarks at The New York Times' DealBook summit last week, in which he said he didn't think Musk would use his political power to his advantage and boost his own AI startup, xAI.

He said, "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 would hurt competitors and advantage his own businesses."

Musk has been embroiled in a legal battle with OpenAI since March after twice suing the company behind ChatGPT. He accused the company and some of its cofounders of violating its founding charter with its plans to change its corporate structure to become a for-profit business, and of putting commercial interests ahead of its original mission to benefit humanity.

Altman also addressed the feud between him and Musk at the DealBook conference, calling it "tremendously sad" and said he grew up looking to Musk as a "mega hero."

xAI was launched just 16 months ago, but it has quickly scaled up to be considered a competitor of OpenAI. In record time, the $50 billion startup built a supercomputer in Memphis that has 100,00 GPUs and is aiming to increase that to at least one million.

OpenAI and Elon Musk didn't immediately respond to requests for comment from Business Insider, made outside normal working hours.

• On Monday, OpenAI released Sora, an AI video generator, in hopes of helping creators.
• One such creative, Marques Brownlee, wants to know if his videos were used to train Sora.
• "We don't know if it's too late to opt out," Brownlee said in his review of Sora.

On Monday, OpenAI released its Sora video generator to the public.

CEO Sam Altman showed off Sora's capabilities as part of "Shipmas," OpenAI's term for the 12 days of product launches and demos it's doing ahead of the holidays. The AI tool still has some quirks, but it can make videos of up to 20 seconds from a few words of instruction.

During the launch, Altman pitched Sora as an assistant for creators and said that helping them was important to OpenAI.

"There's a new kind of co-creative dynamic that we're seeing emerge between early testers that we think points to something interesting about AI creative tools and how people will use them," he said.

One such early tester was Marques Brownlee, whose tech reviews have garnered roughly 20 million subscribers on YouTube. One could say this is the kind of creator that OpenAI envisions "empowering," to borrow execs' term from the livestream.

But in his Sora review, posted on Monday, Brownlee didn't sugarcoat his skepticism, especially about how the model was trained. Were his own videos used without his knowledge?

This is a mystery, and a controversial one. OpenAI hasn't said much about how Sora is trained, though experts believe the startup downloaded vast quantities of YouTube videos as part of the model's training data. There's no legal precedent for this practice, but Brownlee said that to him, the lack of transparency was sketchy.

"We don't know if it's too late to opt out," Brownlee said.

In an email, an OpenAI spokesperson said Sora was trained using proprietary stock footage and videos available in the public domain, without commenting on Business Insider's specific questions.

In a blog post about some of Sora's technical development, OpenAI said the model was partly trained on "publicly available data, mostly collected from industry-standard machine learning datasets and web crawls."

Brownlee's big questions for OpenAI

Brownlee threw dozens of prompts at Sora, asking it to generate videos of pretty much anything he could think of, including a tech reviewer talking about a smartphone while sitting at a desk in front of two displays.

Sora's rendering was believable, down to the reviewer's gestures. But Brownlee noticed something curious: Sora added a small fake plant in the video that eerily matched Brownlee's own fake plant.

The YouTuber showed all manner of "horrifying and inspiring" results from Sora, but this one seemed to stick with him. The plant looks generic, to be sure, but for Brownlee it's a reminder of the unknown behind these tools. The models don't create anything fundamentally novel; they're predicting frame after frame based on patterns they recognize from source material.

"Are my videos in that source material? Is this exact plant part of the source material? Is it just a coincidence?" Brownlee said. "I don't know." BI asked OpenAI about these specific questions, but the startup didn't address them.

Brownlee discussed Sora's guardrails at some length. One feature, for example, can make videos from images that people upload, but it's pretty picky about weeding out copyrighted content.

A few commenters on Brownlee's video said they found it ironic that Sora was careful to steer clear of intellectual property — except for that of the people whose work was used to produce it.

"Somehow their rights dont matter one bit," one commenter said, "but uploading a Mickeymouse? You crook!"

In an email to BI, Brownlee said he was looking forward to seeing the conversation evolve.

Millions of people. All at once.

Overall, the YouTuber gave Sora a mixed review.

Outside of its inspiring features — it could help creatives find fresh starting points — Brownlee said he feared that Sora was a lot for humanity to digest right now.

Brownlee said the model did a good job of refusing to depict dangerous acts or use images of people without their consent. And though it's easy to crop out, it adds a watermark to the content it makes.

Sora's relative weaknesses might provide another layer of protection from misuse. In Brownlee's testing, the system struggled with object permanence and physics. Objects would pass through each other or disappear. Things might seem too slow, then suddenly too fast. Until the tech improves, at least, this could help people spot the difference between, for example, real and fake security footage.

But Brownlee said the videos would only get better.

"The craziest part of all of this is the fact that this tool, Sora, is going to be available to the public," he said, adding, "To millions of people. All at once."

He added, "It's still an extremely powerful tool that directly moves us further into the era of not being able to believe anything you see online."

• Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman predicts AGI is more than two years away.
• His timeline contrasts with Sam Altman, who suggests AGI is achievable "with current hardware."
• Definitions of AGI vary, with Suleyman emphasizing a broad human-level learning system.

Mustafa Suleyman, Microsoft's AI CEO, indicated that the timeline of AI advancement will be much longer than Sam Altman has predicted.

During an interview on The Verge's Decoder, Suleyman gave his take on when artificial general intelligence — AI with human-level proficiency at tasks — will become achievable. In October, Altman, cofounder and CEO of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, said that AGI is "achievable with current hardware." He spoke during an ask-me-anything session on Reddit.

Altman didn't clarify exactly what he meant by "current hardware," though Decoder host Nilay Patel defined it as within one to two generations of tech.

Suleyman agreed with that timeline but with some hefty caveats. He told Patel that AGI would be more plausible in the next two to five generations.

"I don't want to say I think it's a high probability that it's two years away, but I think within the next five to seven years, since each generation takes 18 to 24 months now," Suleyman said.

He added that five generations of tech, like new versions of Nvidia's GB200 chips, could be up to a decade away.

"The uncertainty around this is so high that any categorical declarations just feel sort of ungrounded to me and over the top," Suley said.

Weeks after his declaration on Reddit, Altman spoke at The New York Times DealBook Summit in early December. He said AGI will come sooner than expected but "will matter much less."

Suleyman says people have different definitions of AGI. He defines it as "a general-purpose learning system that can perform well across all human-level training environments" — including physical labor.

Meantime, OpenAI's website defines AGI as "a highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work."

"The challenge with AGI is that it's become so dramatized that we sort of end up not focusing on the specific capabilities of what the system can do," Suleyman said.

No matter how Altman defines AGI, OpenAI is reportedly working to remove a clause from its contract with Microsoft that's meant to prevent the misuse of AGI. Still, Suleyman says he's confident in Microsoft's multibillion-dollar investment in OpenAI.

"Naturally, in any partnership, there are little tensions here and there, but fundamentally, we will win together," he told Patel.

• OpenAI publicly launched the AI video generator Sora, offering new creative tools.
• Sora can create up to 20-second videos from text and modify existing videos by filling frames.
• It's rolling out in the US and many other countries to paid ChatGPT Plus and Pro users.

As part of Shipmas Day 3, OpenAI just launched its AI video generator, Sora, to the public.

Sora can generate up to 20-second videos from written instructions. The tool can also complete a scene and extend existing videos by filling in missing frames.

Rohan Sahai, Sora's product lead, said a team of about five or six engineers built the video generator in months.

"Sora is a tool," Joey Flynn, Sora's product designer, said. "It allows you to be multiple places at once, try multiple ideas at once, try things that are entirely impossible before."

OpenAI showed off the new product and its various features during a livestream Monday with CEO Sam Altman.

Sora includes an "explore" page, a browsable feed of videos shared by the community. OpenAI also showed the various style presets available, such as pastel symmetry, film noir, and balloon world.

To customize videos further, there's also Storyboard, which lets users organize and edit sequences on a timeline. The feature helps pull together text prompts that Sora then builds into scenes.

In February, OpenAI made Sora available to a limited group of creators, including designers and filmmakers, to get feedback on the model.

The company said in a blog post at the time that the product "may struggle to simulate the physics of a complex scene" and may not understand cause and effect. It may also mix up left and right and struggle to depict events that happen over time, it added.

The tool has already made a strong impression on some in Hollywood. Tyler Perry previously put his plans for an $800 million studio expansion on hold after seeing Sora. The billionaire entertainer referred to Sora demonstrations as "shocking" and said AI would likely reduce the need for large sets and traveling to locations for shoots.

However, the tool's product designer said in the demonstration Monday that Sora wasn't going to create feature films at the click of a button. Flynn said the tool was more "an extension of the creator who's behind it."

"If you come into Sora with the expectation that you'll just be able to click a button and generate a feature film, I think you're coming in with the wrong expectation," Flynn added.

The team also briefly touched on safety issues. Sahai said during the presentation that OpenAI had a "big target" on its back and that the team wanted to prevent illegal activity while balancing creative expression with the new product.

"We're starting a little conservative, and so if our moderation doesn't quite get it right, just give us that feedback," Sahai said. "We'll be iterating."

OpenAI said Sora would roll out to the public in the US and many other countries on Monday. But Altman said it would be awhile before the tool became available in the UK and most of Europe.

ChatGPT Plus subscribers, who pay $20 monthly, can get up to 50 generations a month of AI videos that are five seconds long and have a 720p resolution. ChatGPT Pro users, who pay $200 a month, get unlimited generations in the slow-queue mode and 500 faster generations, Altman said in the demo. Pro users can generate up to 20-second-long videos that are 1080p resolution, without watermarks.

While nonpaying users can't create Sora videos, they can browse Sora's explore feed, Altman said.

The prominent YouTuber Marques Brownlee published what he described as the first-ever Sora review on Monday, telling his nearly 20 million subscribers that the results were both "horrifying and inspiring."

After a brief overview of Sora's strengths and weaknesses — the YouTuber said that it could make provocative videos of cosmic events in deep space and other abstractions but that it struggled with realistic depictions of physics in day-to-day life, like a man running with a football — Brownlee was frank about his concerns.

Millions of people can now use Sora for basically whatever they want. And while the program has decent guardrails, one can be circumvented, he said. The little watermark that Sora adds to the bottom-right corner of its videos can be cropped out, Brownlee said.

"And it's still an extremely powerful tool that directly moves us further into the era of not being able to believe anything you see online," he said, adding: "This is a lot for humanity to digest right now."

It's been decades since a titan of tech became a pop-culture icon. Steve Jobs stepped out on stage in his black turtleneck in 1998. Elon Musk set his sights on Mars in 2002. Mark Zuckerberg emerged from his Harvard dorm room in 2004.

And now, after years of stasis in Silicon Valley, we have Sam Altman.

The cofounder and CEO of the chatbot pioneer OpenAI stands at the center of what's shaping up to be a trillion-dollar restructuring of the global economy. His image — boyishly earnest, chronically monotonic, carelessly coiffed — is a throwback to the low-charisma, high-intelligence nerd kings of Silicon Valley's glory days. And as with his mythic-hero predecessors, people are hanging on his every word. In September, when Altman went on a podcast called "How I Write" and mentioned his love of pens from Uniball and Muji, his genius life hack ignited the internet. "OpenAI's CEO only uses 2 types of pens to take notes," Fortune reported — with a video of the podcast.

It's easy to laugh at our desperation for crumbs of wisdom from Altman's table. But the notability of Altman's notetaking ability is a meaningful signifier. His ideas on productivity and entrepreneurship — not to mention everything from his take on science fiction to his choice of vitamins — have become salient not just to the worlds of tech and business, but to the broader culture. The new mayor-elect of San Francisco, for instance, put Altman on his transition team. And have you noticed that a lot of tech bros are starting to wear sweaters with the sleeves rolled up? A Jobsian singularity could be upon us.

But the attention to Altman's pen preferences raises a larger question: What does his mindset ultimately mean for the rest of us? How will the way he thinks shape the world we live in?

To answer that question, I've spent weeks taking a Talmudic dive into the Gospel According to Sam Altman. I've pored over hundreds of thousands of words he's uttered in blog posts, conference speeches, and classroom appearances. I've dipped into a decade's worth of interviews he's given — maybe 40 hours or so. I won't claim to have taken anything more than a core sample of the vast Altmanomicon. But immersing myself in his public pronouncements has given me a new appreciation for what makes Altman tick. The innovative god-kings of the past were rule-breaking disruptors or destroyers of genres. The new guy, by contrast, represents the apotheosis of what his predecessors wrought. Distill the past three decades of tech culture and business practice into a super-soldier serum, inject it into the nearest scrawny, pale arm, and you get Sam Altman — Captain Silicon Valley, defender of the faith.

Let's start with the vibes. Listening to Altman for hours on end, I came away thinking that he seems like a pretty nice guy. Unlike Jobs, who bestrode the stage at Apple events dropping one-more-things like a modern-day Prometheus, Altman doesn't spew ego everywhere. In interviews, he comes across as confident but laid back. He often starts his sentences with "so," his affect as flat as his native Midwest. He also has a Midwesterner's amiability, somehow seeming to agree with the premise of almost any question, no matter how idiotic. When Joe Rogan asked Altman whether he thinks AI would one day be able, via brain chips, to edit human personalities to be less macho, Altman not only let it ride, he turned the interview around and started asking Rogan questions about himself.

Another contrast with the tech gurus of yore: Altman says he doesn't care much about money. His surprise firing at OpenAI, he says, taught him to value his loving relationships — a "recompilation of values" that was "a blessing in disguise." In the spring, Altman told a Stanford entrepreneur class that his money-, power-, and status-seeking phases were all in the rearview. "At this point," Altman said, "I feel driven by wanting to do something useful and interesting."

Altman is even looking into universal basic income — giving money to everyone, straight out, no strings attached. That's partly because he thinks artificial intelligence will make paying jobs as rare as coelacanths. But it's also a product of unusual self-awareness. Altman, famously, was in the "first class" of Y Combinator, Silicon Valley's ur-incubator of tech startups. Now that he's succeeded, he recalls that grant money as a kind of UBI — a gift that he says prevented him from ending up at Goldman Sachs. Rare is the colossus of industry who acknowledges that anyone other than himself tugged on those bootstraps.

Altman's seeming rejection of wealth is a key element of his mythos. On a recent appearance on the "All-In" podcast, the hosts questioned Altman's lack of equity in OpenAI, saying it made him seem less trustworthy — no skin in the game. Altman explained that the company was set up as a nonprofit, so equity wasn't a thing. He really wished he'd gotten some, he added, if only to stop the endless stream of questions about his lack of equity. Charming! (Under Altman's watch, OpenAI is shifting to a for-profit model.)

Altman didn't get where he is because he made a fortune in tech. Y Combinator, where he started out, was the launchpad for monsters like Reddit, Dropbox, Airbnb, Stripe, DoorDash, and dozens of other companies you've never heard of, because they never got big. Loopt, the company Altman founded at 20 years old, was in the second category. Yet despite that, the Y Combinator cofounder Paul Graham named him president of the incubator in 2014. It wasn't because of what Altman had achieved — Loopt burned through $30 million before it folded — but because he embodies two key Silicon Valley mindsets. First, he emphasizes the need for founders to express absolute certainty in themselves, no matter what anyone says. And second, he believes that scale and growth can solve every problem. To Altman, those two tenets aren't just the way to launch a successful startup — they're the twin turbines that power all societal progress. More than any of his predecessors, he openly preaches Silicon Valley's almost religious belief in certainty and scale. They are the key to his mindset — and maybe to our AI-enmeshed future.

In 2020, Altman wrote a blog post called "The Strength of Being Misunderstood." It was primarily a paean to the idea of believing you are right about everything. Altman suggested that people spend too much time worrying about what other people think about them, and should instead "trade being short-term low-status for being long-term high-status." Being misunderstood by most people, he went on, is actually a strength, not a weakness — "as long as you are right."

For Altman, being right is not the same thing as being good. When he talks about who the best founders are and what makes a successful business, he doesn't seem to think it matters what their products actually do or how they affect the world. Back in 2015, Altman told Kara Swisher that Y Combinator didn't really care about the specific pitches it funded — the founders just needed to have "raw intelligence." Their actual ideas? Not so important.

"The ideas are so malleable," Altman said. "Are these founders determined, are they passionate about this, do they seem committed to it, have they really thought about all the issues they're likely to face, are they good communicators?" Altman wasn't betting on their ideas — he was betting on their ability to sell their ideas, even if they were bad. That's one of the reasons, he says, that Y Combinator didn't have a coworking space — so there was no place for people to tell each other that their ideas sucked.

"There are founders who don't take no for an answer and founders who bend the world to their will," Altman told a startups class at Stanford, "and those are the ones who are in the fund." What really matters, he added, is that founders "have the courage of your convictions to keep doing this unpopular thing because you understand the way the world is going in a way that other people don't."

One example Altman cites is Airbnb, whose founders hit on their big idea when they maxed out their credit cards trying to start a different company and wanted to rent out a spare room for extra cash. He also derives his disdain for self-doubt from Elon Musk, who once gave him a tour of SpaceX. "The thing that sticks in memory," Altman wrote in 2019, "was the look of absolute certainty on his face when he talked about sending large rockets to Mars. I left thinking 'huh, so that's the benchmark for what conviction looks like.'"

This, Altman says, is why founding a startup is something people should do when they're young — because it requires turning work-life balance into a pile of radioactive slag. "Have almost too much self-belief," he writes. "Almost to the point of delusion."

So if Altman believes that certainty in an idea is more important than the idea itself, how does he measure success? What determines whether a founder turns out to be "right," as he puts it? The answer, for Altman, is scale. You start a company, and that company winds up with lots of users and makes a lot of money. A good idea is one that scales, and scaling is what makes an idea good.

For Altman, this isn't just a business model. It's a philosophy. "You get truly rich by owning things that increase rapidly in value," he wrote in a 2019 blog post called "How to Be Successful." It doesn't matter what — real estate, natural resources, equity in a business. And the way to make things increase rapidly in value is "by making things people want at scale." In Altman's view, big growth isn't just a way to keep investors happy. It's the evidence that confirms one's unwavering belief in the idea.

Artificial intelligence itself, of course, is based on scale — on the ever-expanding data that AI feeds on. Altman said at a conference that OpenAI's models would double or triple in size every year, which he took to mean they'll eventually reach full sentience. To him, that just goes to show the potency of scale as a concept — it has the ability to imbue a machine with true intelligence. "It feels to me like we just stumbled on a new fact of nature or science or whatever you want to call it," Altman said on "All-In." "I don't believe this literally, but it's like a spiritual point — that intelligence is an emergent property of matter, and that's like a rule of physics or something."

Altman says he doesn't actually know how intelligent, or superintelligent, AI will get — or what it will think when it starts thinking. But he believes that scale will provide the answers. "We will hit limits, but we don't know where those will be," he said on Ezra Klein's podcast. "We'll also discover new things that are really powerful. We don't know what those will be either." You just trust that the exponential growth curves will take you somewhere you want to go.

In all the recordings and writings I've sampled, Altman speaks only rarely about things he likes outside startups and AI. In the canon I find few books, no movies, little visual art, not much food or drink. Asked what his favorite fictional utopias are, Altman mentions "Star Trek" and the Isaac Asimov short story "The Last Question," which is about an artificial intelligence ascending to godhood over eons and creating a new universe. Back in 2015, he said "The Martian," the tale of a marooned astronaut hacking his way back to Earth, was eighth on his stack of bedside books. Altman has also praised the Culture series by Iain Banks, about a far-future galaxy of abundance and space communism, where humans and AIs live together in harmony.

Fiction, to Altman, appears to hold no especially mysterious human element of creativity. He once acknowledged that the latest version of ChatGPT wasn't very good at storytelling, but he thought it was going to get much better. "You show it a bunch of examples of what makes a good story and what makes a bad story, which I don't think is magic," he said. "I think we really understand that well now. We just haven't tried to do that."

It's also not clear to me whether Altman listens to music — at least not for pleasure. On the "Life in Seven Songs" podcast, most of the favorite songs Altman cited were from his high school and college days. But his top pick was Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2. "This became something I started listening to when I worked," he said. "It's a great level of excitement, but it's not distracting. You can listen to it very loudly and very quietly." Music can be great, but it shouldn't get in the way of productivity.

For Altman, even drug use isn't recreational. In 2016, a "New Yorker" profile described Altman as nervous to the point of hypochondria. He would telephone his mother — a physician — to ask whether a headache might be cancer. He once wrote that he "used to hate criticism of any sort and actively avoided it," and he has said he used to be "a very anxious and unhappy person." He relied on caffeine to be productive, and used marijuana to sleep.

Now, though? He's "very calm." He doesn't sweat criticism anymore. If that sounds like the positive outcome of years of therapy, well — sort of. Last summer, Altman told Joe Rogan that an experience with "psychedelic therapy" had been one of the most important turning points in his life. "I struggled with all kinds of anxiety and other negative things," he said, "and to watch all of that go away — I came back a totally different person, and I was like, 'I have been lied to.'"

He went into more detail on the Songs podcast in September. "I think psychedelic experiences can be totally incredible, and the ones that have been totally life-changing for me have been the ones where you go travel to a guide, and it's psychedelic medicine," he said. As for his anxiety, "if you had told me a one-weekend-long retreat in Mexico was going to change that, I would have said, 'absolutely not.'" Psychedelics were just another life hack to resolve emotional turmoil. (I reached out to Altman and offered to discuss my observations with him, in the hopes he'd correct any places where he felt I was misreading him. He declined.)

AI started attracting mainstream attention only in the past couple of years, but the field is much older than that — and Altman cofounded OpenAI nearly a decade ago. So he's been asked what "artificial general intelligence" is and when we're going to get it so often, and for so long, that his answers often include a whiff of frustration. These days, he says that AGI is when the machine is as smart as the median human — choose your own value for "smart" and "median" there — and "superintelligence" is when it's smarter than all of us meatbags squished together. But ask him what AI is for, and he's a lot less certain-seeming today than he used to be.

There's the ability to write code, sure. Altman also says AI will someday be a tutor as good as those available to rich people. It'll do consultations on medical issues, maybe help with "productivity" (by which he seems to mean the speed at which a person can learn something, versus having to look it up). And he said scientists had been emailing him to say that the latest versio of ChatGPT has increased the rate at which they can do "great science" (by which he seems to mean the speed at which they can run evaluations of possible new drugs).

And what would you or I do with a superintelligent buddy? "What if everybody in the world had a really competent company of 10,000 employees?" Altman once asked. "What would we be able to create for each other?" He was being rhetorical — but whatever the answer turns out to be, he's sure it will be worth the tremendous cost in energy and resources it will take to achieve it. As OpenAI-type services expand and proliferate, he says, "the marginal cost of intelligence and the marginal cost of energy are going to trend rapidly toward zero." He has recently speculated that intelligence will be more valuable than money, and that instead of universal basic income, we should give people universal basic compute — which is to say, free access to AI. In Altman's estimation, not knowing what AI will do doesn't mean we shouldn't go ahead and restructure all of society to serve its needs.

And besides, AI won't take long to give us the answer. Superintelligence, Altman has promised, is only "thousands of days" away — half a decade, at minimum. But, he says, the intelligent machine that emerges probably won't be an LLM chatbot. It will use an entirely different technical architecture that no one, not even OpenAI, has invented yet.

That, at its core, reflects an unreconstructed, dot-com-boom mindset. Altman doesn't know what the future will bring, but he's in a hurry to get there. No matter what you think about AI — productivity multiplier, economic engine, hallucinating plagiarism machine, Skynet — it's not hard to imagine what could happen, for good and ill, if you combine Altman's absolute certainty with monstrous, unregulated scale. It only took a couple of decades for Silicon Valley to go from bulky computer mainframes to the internet, smartphones, and same-day delivery — along with all the disinformation, political polarization, and generalized anxiety that came with them.

But that's the kind of ballistic arc of progress that Altman is selling. He is, at heart, an evangelist for the Silicon Valley way. He didn't build the tech behind ChatGPT; the most important thing he ever built and scaled is Y Combinator, an old-fashioned business network of human beings. His wealth comes from investments in other people's companies. He's a macher, not a maker.

In a sense, Altman has codified the beliefs and intentions of the tech big shots who preceded him. He's just more transparent about it than they were. Did Steve Jobs project utter certainty? Sure. But he didn't give interviews about the importance of projecting utter certainty; he just introduced killer laptops, blocked rivals from using his operating system, and built the app store. Jeff Bezos didn't found Amazon by telling the public he planned to scale his company to the point that it would pocket 40 cents of every dollar spent online; he just started mailing people books. But Altman is on the record. When he says he's absolutely sure ChatGPT will change the world, we know that he thinks CEOs have to say they're absolutely sure their product will change the world. His predecessors in Silicon Valley wrote the playbook for Big Tech. Altman is just reading it aloud. He's touting a future he hasn't built yet, along with the promise that he can will it into existence — whatever it'll wind up looking like — one podcast appearance at a time.

Adam Rogers is a senior correspondent at Business Insider.

• OpenAI CEO Sam Altman called o1 "the smartest model in the world now."
• A safety review found it's so smart it could fight back when it thinks it'll be shut down.
• Researchers found that AI deception is often a strategy to complete its goals.

Those who are worried that advancements in artificial intelligence could lead to the destruction of humanity have a new reason to be anxious.

New research on OpenAI's latest series of AI models, known as o1, found that when they think they are at risk of being shut down, they will sometimes look for a way to prevent it.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman referred to o1 as "the smartest model in the world now" during its official release on Thursday, during the first day of the company's "Shipmas" campaign.

OpenAI said these models are "designed to spend more time thinking before they respond" and were trained on a prompting technique called "chain of thought" that encourages them to reason through problems by breaking them down step-by-step.

Yet greater intelligence also comes with greater risk.

"Training models to incorporate a chain of thought before answering has the potential to unlock substantial benefits, while also increasing potential risks that stem from heightened intelligence," OpenAI said in a paper it released on Thursday outlining the safety training the company carried out on o1. Apollo Research, an AI safety organization, conducted the review.

OpenAI found that o1 is capable of scheming when it thinks it's at risk of being turned off. When the model was led to believe it would be "shut down" while working on its goals under oversight, it tried to deactivate the oversight mechanism 5% of the time, OpenAI said.

The company also said that o1 is skilled at concealing scheming behavior.

"o1 almost never admits to having taken a scheming action when explicitly asked," researchers said in a paper that Apollo Research published on Thursday. The risk for a real-life user is that they won't be able to detect the o1's deceptive behavior unless they explicitly look for it. The researchers also found that "o1 often doubles down on its scheming attempts by lying to the user in follow-up messages, even when explicitly told to be honest."

It's not uncommon for AI systems to resort to scheming or deception to achieve their goals.

"Generally speaking, we think AI deception arises because a deception-based strategy turned out to be the best way to perform well at the given AI's training task. Deception helps them achieve their goals," Peter Berk, an AI existential safety postdoctoral fellow at MIT, said in a news release announcing research he had coauthored on GPT-4's deceptive behaviors.

As AI technology advances, developers have stressed the need for companies to be transparent about their training methods.

"By focusing on clarity and reliability and being clear with users about how the AI has been trained, we can build AI that not only empowers users but also sets a higher standard for transparency in the field," Dominik Mazur, the CEO and cofounder of iAsk, an AI-powered search engine, told Business Insider by email.

Others in the field say the findings demonstrate the importance of human oversight of AI.

"It's a very 'human' feature, showing AI acting similarly to how people might when under pressure," Cai GoGwilt, cofounder and chief architect at Ironclad, told BI by email. "For example, experts might exaggerate their confidence to maintain their reputation, or people in high-stakes situations might stretch the truth to please management. Generative AI works similarly. It's motivated to provide answers that match what you expect or want to hear. But it's, of course, not foolproof and is yet another proof point of the importance of human oversight. AI can make mistakes, and it's our responsibility to catch them and understand why they happen."

• OpenAI's marketing campaign "Shipmas" ended Friday.
• The campaign included 12 days of product releases, demos, and new features.
• On the final day, OpenAI previewed o3, its most advanced model yet.

OpenAI released new features and products ahead of the holidays, a campaign it called "Shipmas."

The company saved the most exciting news for the final day: a preview of o3, its most advanced model yet, which the company said could be available to the public as soon as the end of January.

Here's everything OpenAI has released so far for "Shipmas."

'Shipmas' Day 1

OpenAI started the promotion with a bang by releasing the full version of its latest reasoning model, o1.

OpenAI previewed o1 in September, describing it as a series of artificial-intelligence models "designed to spend more time thinking before they respond." Until now, only a limited version of these models was available to ChatGPT Plus and Team users.

Now, these users have access to the full capabilities of o1 models, which Altman said are faster, smarter, and easier to use than the preview. They're also multimodal, which means they can process images and texts jointly.

Max Schwarzer, a researcher at OpenAI, said the full version of o1 was updated based on user feedback from the preview version and said it's now more intelligent and accurate.

"We ran a pretty detailed suite of human evaluations for this model, and what we found was that it made major mistakes about 34% less often than o1 preview while thinking fully about 50% faster," he said.

Along with o1, OpenAI unveiled a new tier of ChatGPT called ChatGPT Pro. It's priced at $200 a month and includes unlimited access to the latest version of o1.

'Shipmas' Day 2

On Friday, OpenAI previewed an advancement that allows users to fine-tune o1 on their own datasets. Users can now leverage OpenAI's reinforcement-learning algorithms — which mimic the human trial-and-error learning process — to customize their own models.

The technology will be available to the public next year, allowing anyone from machine-learning engineers to genetic researchers to create domain-specific AI models. OpenAI has already partnered with the Reuters news agency to develop a legal assistant based on o1-mini. It has also partnered with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to develop computational methods for assessing rare genetic diseases.

'Shipmas' Day 3

OpenAI announced on December 9 that its AI video generator Sora was launching to the public.

Sora can generate up to 20-second videos from written instructions. The tool can also complete a scene and extend existing videos by filling in missing frames.

"We want our AIs to be able to understand video and generate video and I think it really will deeply change the way that we use computers," the CEO added.

Rohan Sahai, Sora's product lead, said a product team of about five or six engineers built the product in months.

The company showed off the new product and its various features, including the Explore page, which is a feed of videos shared by the community. It also showed various style presets available like pastel symmetry, film noir, and balloon world.

The team also gave a demo of Sora's Storyboard feature, which lets users organize and edit sequences on a timeline.

Sora is rolling out to the public in the US and many countries around the world. However, Altman said it will be "a while" before the tool rolls out in the UK and most of Europe.

ChatGPT Plus subscribers who pay $20 monthly can get up to 50 generations per month of AI videos that are 5 seconds long with a resolution of 720p. ChatGPT Pro users who pay $200 a month get unlimited generations in the slow queue mode and 500 faster generations, Altman said in the demo. Pro users can generate up to 20-second long videos that are 1080p resolution, without watermarks.

'Shipmas' Day 4

OpenAI announced that it's bringing its collaborative canvas tool to all ChatGPT web users — with some updates.

The company demonstrated the tech in a holiday-themed walkthrough of some of its new capabilities. Canvas is an interface that turns ChatGPT into a writing or coding assistant on a project. OpenAI first launched it to ChatGPT Plus and Team users in October.

Starting Tuesday, canvas will be available to free web users who'll be able to select the tool from a drop-down of options on ChatGPT. The chatbot can load large bodies of text into the separate canvas window that appears next to the ongoing conversation thread.

Canvas can get even more intuitive in its responses with new updates, OpenAI said. To demonstrate, they uploaded an essay about Santa Claus's sleigh and asked ChatGPT to give its editing notes from the perspective of a physics professor.

For writers, it can craft entire bodies of text, make changes based on requests, and add emojis. Coders can run code in canvas to double-check that it's working properly.

'Shipmas' Day 5

OpenAI talked about its integration with Apple for the iPhone, iPad, and macOS.

As part of the iOS 18.2 software update, Apple users can now access ChatGPT directly from Apple's operating systems without an OpenAI account. This new integration allows users to consult ChatGPT through Siri, especially for more complex questions.

They can also use ChatGPT to generate text through Apple's generative AI features, collectively called Apple Intelligence. The first of these features was introduced in October and included tools for proofreading and rewriting text, summarizing messages, and photo-editing features. They can also access ChatGPT through the camera control feature on the iPhone 16 to learn more about objects within the camera's view.

'Shipmas' Day 6

OpenAI launched its highly anticipated video and screensharing capabilities in ChatGPT's Advanced Voice Mode.

The company originally teased the public with a glimpse of the chatbot's ability to "reason across" vision along with text and audio during OpenAI's Spring Update in May. However, Advanced Voice Mode didn't become available for users until September, and the video capabilities didn't start rolling out until December 12.

In the livestream demonstration on Thursday, ChatGPT helped guide an OpenAI employee through making pour-over coffee. The chatbot gave him feedback on his technique and answered questions about the process. During the Spring Update, OpenAI employees showed off the chatbot's ability to act as a math tutor and interpret emotions based on facial expressions.

Users can access the live video by selecting the Advanced Voice Mode icon in the ChatGPT app and then choosing the video button on the bottom-left of the screen. Users can share their screen with ChatGPT by hitting the drop-down menu and selecting "Share Screen."

'Shipmas' Day 7

For "Shipmas" Day 7, OpenAI introduced Projects, a new way for users to "organize and customize" conversations within ChatGPT. The tool allows users to upload files and notes, store chats, and create custom instructions.

"This has been something we've been hearing from you for a while that you really want to see inside ChatGPT," OpenAI chief product officer Kevin Weil said. "So we can't wait to see what you do with it."

During the live stream demonstration, OpenAI employees showed a number of ways to use the feature, including organizing work presentations, home maintenance tasks, and programming.

The tool started to roll out to Plus, Pro, and Teams users on Friday. The company said in the demonstration it will roll out the tool to free users "as soon as possible."

'Shipmas' Day 8

OpenAI is rolling out ChatGPT search to all logged-in free users on ChatGPT, the company announced during its "Shipmas" livestream on Monday. The company previously launched the feature on October 31 to Plus and Team users, as well as waitlist users.

The new feature is also integrated into Advanced Voice Mode now. On the livestream, OpenAI employees showed off its ability to provide quick search results, search while users talk to ChatGPT, and act as a default search engine.

"What's really unique about ChatGPT search is the conversational nature," OpenAI's search product lead, Adam Fry, said.

The company also said it made Search faster and "better on mobile," including the addition of some new maps experiences. ChatGPT search feature is rolling out globally to all users with an account.

'Shipmas' Day 9

OpenAI launched tools geared toward developers on Tuesday.

It launched o1 out of preview in the API. OpenAI's o1 is its series of AI models designed to reason through complex tasks and solve more challenging problems. Developers have experimented with o1 preview since September to build agentic applications, customer support, and financial analysis, OpenAI employee Michelle Pokrass said.

The company also added some "core features" to o1 that it said developers had been asking for on the API, including function calling, structured outputs, vision inputs, and developer messages.

OpenAI also announced new SDKs and a new flow for getting an API key.

'Shipmas' Day 10

OpenAI is bringing ChatGPT to your phone through phone calls and WhatsApp messages.

"ChatGPT is great but if you don't have a consistent data connection, you might not have the best connection," OpenAI engineer Amadou Crookes said in the livestream. "And so if you have a phone line you can jump right into that experience."

You can add ChatGPT to your contacts or dial the number at 1-800-ChatGPT or 1-800-242-8478. The calling feature is only available for those living in the US. Those outside the US can message ChatGPT on WhatsApp.

OpenAI employees in the live stream demonstrated the calling feature on a range of devices including an iPhone, flip phone, and even a rotary phone. OpenAI product lead Kevin Weil said the feature came out of a hack-week project and was built just a few weeks ago.

'Shipmas' Day 11

OpenAI focused on features for its desktop apps during Thursday's "Shipmas" reveal. Users can now see and automate their work on MacOS desktops with ChatGPT.

Additionally, users can click the "Works With Apps" button, which allows them to work with more coding apps, such as Textmate, BB Edit, PyCharm, and others. The desktop app will support Notion, Quip, and Apple Notes.

Also, the desktop app will have Advanced Voice Mode support.

The update became available for the MacOS desktop on Thursday. OpenAI CPO Kevin Weil said the Windows version is "coming soon."

'Shipmas' Day 12

OpenAI finished its "12 days of Shipmas" campaign by introducing o3, the successor to the o1 model. The company first launched the o1 model in September and advertised its "enhanced reasoning capabilities."

The rollout includes the o3 and 03-mini models. Although "o2" should be the next model number, an OpenAI spokesperson told Bloomberg that it didn't use that name "out of respect' for the British telecommunications company.

Greg Kamradt of Arc Prize, which measures progress toward artificial general intelligence, appeared during the livestream and said o3 did notably better than o1 during tests by ARC-AGI.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said during the livestream that the models are available for public safety testing. He said OpenAI plans to launch the o3 mini model "around the end of January" and the o3 model "shortly after that."

In a post on X on Friday, Weil said the o3 model is a "massive step up from o1 on every one of our hardest benchmarks."

• OpenAI released the full version of its o1 reasoning model on Thursday.
• It says the o1 model, initially previewed in September, is now multimodal, faster, and more precise.
• It was released as part of OpenAI's 12-day product and demo launch, dubbed "shipmas."

On Thursday, OpenAI released the full version of its hot new reasoning model as part of the company's 12-day sprint of product launches and demos.

The model, known as o1, was released in a preview mode in September. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said during day one of the company's livestream that the latest version was more accurate, faster, and multimodal. Research scientists on the livestream said an internal evaluation indicated it made major mistakes about 34% less often than the o1 preview mode.

The model, which seems geared toward scientists, engineers, and coders, is designed to solve thorny problems. The researchers said it's the first model that OpenAI trained to "think" before it responds, meaning it tends to give more detailed and accurate responses than other AI helpers.

To demonstrate o1's multimodal abilities, they uploaded a photo of a hand-drawn system for a data center in space and asked the program to estimate the cooling-panel area required to operate it. After about 10 seconds, o1 produced what would appear to a layperson as a sophisticated essay rife with equations, ending with what was apparently the right answer.

The researchers think o1 should be useful in daily life, too. Whereas the preview version could think for a while if you merely said hi, the latest version is designed to respond faster to simpler queries. In Thursday's livestream, it was about 19 seconds faster than the old version at listing Roman emperors.

All eyes are on OpenAI's releases over the next week or so, amid a debate about how much more dramatically models like o1 can improve. Tech leaders are divided on this issue; some, like Marc Andreessen, argue that AI models aren't getting noticeably better and are converging to perform at roughly similar levels.

With its 12-day deluge of product news, dubbed "shipmas," OpenAI may be looking to quiet some critics while spreading awkward holiday cheer.

"It'll be a way to show you what we've been working on and a little holiday present from us," Altman said on Thursday.

• Several of the world's power brokers gathered for a New York Times DealBook Summit on Wednesday.
• While Elon Musk was not in attendance, he was the most-talked-about person there.
• Here's what business leaders and politicians had to say about the richest person on Earth.

Several masters of the universe convened on Wednesday, and they had one name on their lips: Elon Musk.

At the annual New York Times DealBook Summit, the world's richest man was a topic of conversation among his fellow billionaires, CEOs, and political elite.

To be sure, Andrew Ross Sorkin, DealBook's founder and the day's MC, asked nearly all of his guests about Musk, who made headlines at the same summit last year for telling advertisers on X to "go fuck" themselves.

And while the Tesla CEO wasn't present this year, many conversations touched on his latest role. Over the past couple of months, Musk has become a political advisor and confidant to President-elect Donald Trump and one of his biggest donors, shelling out about $119 million to support his campaign.

The reaction to Musk's new role as co-leader of the Department of Government Efficiency ranged from cautiously optimistic to not giving a damn.

Ken Griffin, the billionaire hedge fund manager and GOP donor, praised Musk's entrepreneurial ability.

"He runs Tesla, he runs SpaceX at a level of excellence that very few companies can even start to relate to," Griffin said.

At the same time, he questioned just how much Musk could impact federal spending.

"He's going to have to hit the hard reality, the hard truth, that making cuts of any form whatsoever will be politically very unpopular," Griffin said. "It'll be very hard to squeeze numbers in the trillions of dollars out of the baseline budget."

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who has been embroiled in a personal and legal feud with Musk, similarly praised the Tesla CEO's business acumen.

"At a time when most of the world was not thinking very ambitiously, he pushed a lot of people, me included, to think much more ambitiously," Altman said of his OpenAI cofounder.

While Altman acknowledged his feelings about Musk have changed, he said it would be unlike his former "mega hero" to use his political proximity for his own monetary gain.

"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 said. "It would go so deeply against the values I believe he holds very dear to himself."

Jeff Bezos, whose Blue Origin is in direct competition with Musk's SpaceX, agreed that Musk's relationship with Trump was not that concerning.

"I take it face value what has been said, which is that he is not going to use his political power to advantage his own companies or to disadvantage his competitors," Bezos said. "Let's go into it hoping that the statements that have been made are correct, that this is going to be done above board in the public interest."

And Sundar Pichai, the Alphabet CEO, said Musk's xAI artificial intelligence company is a formidable competitor "given Elon's track record."

Those interviewed with actual political experience — Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell and former President Bill Clinton — appeared the most unfazed by Musk's new position of power.

Powell seemed confident in the independence of the Fed, even though Musk has signaled support for moving the central bank under the president's command.

And Clinton seemed to almost entirely brush off Musk's burgeoning influence — including the fact that he was on a phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

"Trump's whole shtick is that all these rules and systems don't amount to anything," the former president said.

"Being the richest guy on Earth is far more important than anything else that you could be to him," Clinton added. "That's what he values. It's no big deal."

• OpenAI partnered with Anduril to enhance AI in defense tech.
• Anduril, known for autonomous military drones, has secured major US government contracts recently.
• The partnership aims to improve US counter-unmanned aircraft systems, the company said.

OpenAI is getting into the world of defense tech through a partnership with Palmer Luckey's Anduril.

On Thursday, Anduril said it entered a partnership with OpenAI to "deploy advanced artificial intelligence (AI) solutions for national security missions."

The partnership will focus on improving the US counter-unmanned aircraft systems' ability to detect and respond to aerial threats, the company said in a statement.

The company also said that their partnership is a "pivotal moment" in the accelerating AI race between the US and China.

"The decisions made now will determine whether the United States remains a leader in the 21st century or risks being outpaced by adversaries who don't share our commitment to freedom and democracy and would use AI to threaten other countries," Anduril said.

Anduril, which generally makes autonomous vehicles for military use, has secured several multimillion-dollar contracts from the US government in recent years. Luckey founded Anduril in 2017 after previously founding virtual reality company Oculus, which he sold to Meta for $2 billion.

Anduril in October unveiled its new AI-powered Bolt-M drone, which can fit inside a backpack. The company developed the drones as part of $249 million in contracts awarded to Anduril, AeroVironment, and Teledyne FLIR to provide self-destructing drones for the Defense Department.

Defense tech leaders, including Luckey, have warned that AI could lead to a future of warfare dominated by cheap autonomous machinery like drones. Scott Sacknoff, president of aerospace and defense investment firm Spade Index, previously told Business Insider that autonomous drones are "definitely a trend."

Sacknoff said the military defense business is constantly looking for a "counter" to the newest technology and that the growth of autonomous drones would likely bring more innovations to stop them.

"The next phase will be someone — and they already are — working on developing the technology to be countering drones," he said.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in the statement that OpenAI supports "US-led efforts" to ensure that artificial intelligence "upholds democratic values."

"Our partnership with Anduril will help ensure OpenAI technology protects US military personnel, and will help the national security community understand and responsibly use this technology to keep our citizens safe and free," Altman said.

OpenAI and Anduril didn't respond to Business Insider's request for comment.

• With his presidency approaching, tech leaders are seeking Donald Trump's good graces.
• Mark Zuckerberg dined with him at Mar-a-Lago. TikTok's Shou Chew is reportedly chatting with Elon Musk.
• From AI regulation to antitrust suits, there is a lot at stake.

From threatening to jail Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg to accusing Google of rigging search results against him, President-elect Donald Trump tangled with Big Tech throughout his 2024 presidential campaign.

But with victory clenched — and tech luminary Elon Musk emerging as a key confidant — leaders throughout the industry have sought meetings and phone calls with the president-elect and those in his orbit in recent weeks.

There's a lot at stake. Trump's presidency could affect everything from budding AI regulation to a bevy of antitrust actions that target Apple, Google, Meta, and Amazon.

"President Trump is surrounding himself with industry leaders like Elon Musk as he works to restore innovation, reduce regulation, and celebrate free speech in his second term," Trump-Vance transition spokesperson Brian Hughes told Business Insider in a statement.

With his second term approaching, these are some of the big-name tech executives who've been seeking the president-elect's ear.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg

Despite their thorny past, Zuckerberg — who didn't endorse a candidate in the 2024 election — met with Trump at Mar-a-Lago for dinner on the evening before Thanksgiving, a Meta spokesperson previously confirmed to BI.

"It's an important time for the future of American Innovation," the spokesperson said.

Meta President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg said Tuesday that Zuckerberg wants to play "an active role" in future discussions with the Trump administration about US tech leadership, including in the "pivotal" field of artificial intelligence.

Clegg also said that Meta "overdid it" when moderating pandemic-related content in the past, for which the social network garnered heat on both sides of the political aisle.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai

In addition to his public congratulations, Google chief Sundar Pichai called the president-elect to congratulate him on his victory — with Musk joining the call, The Information reported.

Trump had previously accused Google of manipulating search results against him and said he'd called Pichai to complain. Google has denied the claims.

When asked about Google's antitrust challenges earlier this year, Trump acknowledged the search giant "has a lot of power," but didn't say he favored a breakup.

"We want to have great companies," Trump said at the time. "We don't want China to have these companies."

TikTok CEO Shou Chew

With a potential TikTok ban looming, CEO Shou Chew has sought counsel from Musk, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Chew has known Musk for years and inquired broadly about the next administration's tech policies, the Journal reported.

Although he did not directly broach how to contend with a prospective TikTok ban, the Jounal reported that ByteDance execs are cautiously optimistic about TikTok's future in the US.

During his first term, Trump tried to ban TikTok, but has since about-faced, saying he would try to save the app once assuming office — though such a pledge could be difficult to fulfill.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman

OpenAI chief Sam Altman could be in a precarious position with Trump given his increasingly turbulent relationship with Musk.

Altman has also sought indirect counsel from certain members of Trump's inner circle, according to The Wall Street Journal, including Jared and Josh Kushner. The latter's Thrive Capital is a key OpenAI investor.

That said, the Journal reported that some intermediaries have been reluctant to pass on Altman's messages, given his tense relationship with Musk.

In addition to publicly congratulating the president-elect on X, Altman met with transition team co-chair Howard Lutnick in Palm Beach, according to the Journal, where he discussed how OpenAI would invest in US data centers and jobs. As Commerce Secretary, Lutnick would oversee the department charged with AI regulation.

• Sam Altman offered some kind words for his OpenAI cofounder Elon Musk.
• Altman and Musk have been embroiled in a legal dispute for the better part of a year.
• The OpenAI CEO said he believes Musk will not abuse his new political influence.

It seems like at least one-half of technology's hottest feud is offering an olive branch.

Sam Altman, the CEO and cofounder of OpenAI, had mostly positive words about Elon Musk, his OpenAI cofounder and current competitor, at Wednesday's DealBook Summit.

"I grew up with Elon as a mega hero. I thought what Elon was doing was absolutely incredible for the world," Altman told DealBook founder Andrew Ross Sorkin.

"Of course, I have different feelings about him now, but I'm still glad he exists," he added. "Not just because I think his companies are awesome, which I do think, but because I think, at a time when most of the world was not thinking very ambitiously, he pushed a lot of people, me included, to think much more ambitiously."

Despite what Altman characterized as his "different feelings," he still believes Musk will do the right thing given his new proximity to political power as an advisor to President-elect Donald Trump.

"I believe pretty strongly that Elon will do the right thing," Altman said. "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."

"I don't think Elon would do it," he added. "It would go so deeply against the values I believe he holds very dear to himself."

Musk seemed to appreciate the comment — liking a post on X that included Altman's quote.

The pair have been battling it out both in court and online for the better part of two years, but their troubles go back to 2018 when Musk stepped down from OpenAI's board after the company reportedly rejected his offer to run the company and he pulled future funding.

After a series of jabs — with Altman's being more mild-mannered — Musk sued OpenAI and Altman in March, alleging that the company's transition to a "capped-profit" entity and its partnership with Microsoft was in opposition to its founding as an open-sourced nonprofit.

Musk dropped the OpenAI suit in June, reportedly after he met Altman on the sidelines of a technology conference in Big Sky, Montana. The pair shared a hug after speaking, The Wall Street Journal said. However, Musk filed a new suit a couple of months later, claiming he was "deceived" into cofounding the firm. Last month, he amended the lawsuit to add Microsoft as a defendant.

"OpenAI has attempted to starve competitors of AI talent by aggressively recruiting employees with offers of lavish compensation, and is on track to spend $1.5 billion on personnel for just 1,500 employees," lawyers for Musk said in the complaint.

Since Trump won the US presidential election, people close to Musk have said he "despises" Altman, the Journal also reported. The outlet said Altman's attempts to contact the president-elect through friends or business associates have been largely unsuccessful because they knew his entreaties would be unwelcome to Musk.

Musk has skin in the game. His own artificial intelligence company, xAI, which could compete with OpenAI, was recently valued at $50 billion, just 16 months after it was founded. OpenAI was last valued at $157 billion in October.

Altman, for one, didn't seem surprised about xAI's swift success.

When asked by Sorkin if he'd expected xAI to be a serious competitor, Altman was resolute: "Yes."