*sight* If only the billionaires of the world would allocate their money to more productive causes than petty spite and revenge.
Today, The Verge has reported that OpenAI is looking to build its own social media app, which would be focused on images created via its various image generation tools.
As per The Verge:
“While the project is still in early stages, we’re told there’s an internal prototype focused on ChatGPT’s image generation that has a social feed. CEO Sam Altman has been privately asking outsiders for feedback about the project, our sources say. It’s unclear if OpenAI’s plan is to release the social network as a separate app or integrate it into ChatGPT, which became the most downloaded app globally last month.”
The inspiration for this, of course, is X, which now powers xAI’s Grok AI chatbot, and its other AI projects, by feeding through real-time data from the social network.
Which is a powerful flywheel, feeding in an ever-evolving stream of real-time content, which helps to keep Grok’s answers fresh. And OpenAI apparently wants the same.
More and more publishers are looking to restrict OpenAI’s access to their content, which will make it harder for the company to keep its AI responses relevant. Essentially, AI projects need massive amounts of data, ideally flowing into their circuits in a steady stream, and OpenAI, at this stage, doesn’t have anywhere near the ongoing data resources of its competitors.
Which is where its own social network concept comes in, which, as a bonus, would also give OpenAI chief Sam Altman another means to slap back at Elon Musk, his former business partner turned foil in the evolving AI race.
Musk was an early investor in OpenAI, pledging $100 million to the originally not-for-profit, AI-for-good project. But from the get-go, Musk and Altman didn’t see eye-to-eye. Musk, reportedly, pushed to take more ownership of the project, by nominating himself as CEO, an offer which was rebuffed by the OpenAI board. In response, Musk withdrew his funding, then left the project entirely, labeling it “doomed” for refusing his expanded assistance.
Since then, of course, OpenAI has risen from not-for-profit experiment to a fully-fledged AI business. And evidently, that success irks Elon every day.
Musk created his own AI project, xAI, seemingly out of spite for the OpenAI team, vowing to build a better, “non woke”, AI system, which would be “maximally truth-seeking.” Musk has also launched legal action against Open AI (and primary investor Microsoft) for stealing Twitter/X data, and also for essentially stealing his money, by converting the project into a for-profit enterprise, despite initially gathering funding for a counter-purpose.
Earlier this year, Musk even launched a takeover bid for OpenAI, in another escalation of his ongoing beef. Altman publicly rejected Musk’s offer, but he also noted that OpenAI would be happy to purchase Twitter for $9.74 billion.
And while this is all part of the grand rich-guy Olympics, where they publicly compete to showcase who’s the most dominant, there was likely some truth to Altman’s offer, given the value that a social network would have for the AI project.
Which, again, is why OpenAI is considering its own social network, though gaining any significant traction with such would seemingly be difficult. Though as The Verge notes, ChatGPT is currently the most downloaded app in the world, and maybe, by piggy-backing a sharing option on top of that, OpenAI could produce a viable social network, at least in regards to sharing prompts and visual outputs.
It could be something, or it could just be another footnote in the broader Elon versus OpenAI story.
Either way, it’s another interesting reminder of the value that data plays in the new AI landscape.
