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As his former colleague and artificial intelligence rival prepares for a role in the incoming Trump administration, Sam Altman says he’s not worried about Elon Musk.
Despite there being “lots of things not to like about” Musk, it would go against the billionaire’s values to hurt competitors, the OpenAI chief executive said during an interview at the New York Times (NYT+1.86%) DealBook Summit on Wednesday.
“I may turn out to be wrong, but I believe pretty strongly that Elon will do the right thing and that it would be profoundly un-American to use political power, to the degree that Elon has it, to hurt your competitors and advantage your own businesses,” Altman said.
Earlier this month, the Wall Street Journal (NWSA+1.62%) reported that Altman and other tech and business leaders who have drawn Musk’s ire are worried about the influence he could have on regulation. Altman reportedly reached out to his connections in Trump’s circle, including the President-elect’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and his brother, Joshua Kushner, head of major OpenAI investor Thrive Capital. Altman also reportedly asked a mutual friend to set up a meeting with Howard Lutnick, Trump’s pick for commerce secretary.
Musk, who co-founded OpenAI with Altman in 2015 before leaving over a conflict of interest in 2018, announced in September that his AI startup, xAI, had brought “the most powerful AI training system in the world” online after only 122 days. The Colossus training cluster is powered by 100,000 Nvidia (NVDA+1.73%) H100 training chips and “will double in size” “in a few months” to 200,000 chips, including 50,000 of the more powerful Nvidia H200 chips, Musk said.
Altman said he assumes xAI will “be a really serious competitor” to OpenAI.
“I have different feelings about him [Musk] now, but I’m still glad he exists,” Altman said. “Not just because I think his companies are awesome, which I do think, but because I think he, 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.”
Additionally, Altman said ChatGPT’s search feature is his “favorite product we’ve launched in a long time,” and that OpenAI will announce new launches and demos for the next 12 business days starting on Thursday.