Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Why billionaires like Elon Musk, Sam Altman are fighting over the future of AI | TechCrunch Minute”.
The billionaires are fighting, but about something that really does matter. So, let’s talk about it now, many of you might not know that Elon Musk was actually a co-founder over at open AI back in the day he didn’t last at the company and after he left he became a vocal critic of its operations, so much so that He actually launched a rival service called grock, underneath X, formerly known as Twitter, and then this week he sued open AI for abandoning its founding principles. What are those founding principles? Well open? Ai says it’s for good, but it needs tons of money to get better. In fact, it started Life as a nonprofit back in 2015, but later switched gears and created a for-profit arm open. Ai also says that it has to release closed models because, as its Tech gets better, it also gets more powerful and the company doesn’t want that power. Falling into the wrong hands open AI says that musk wanted control over its for-profit arm, which it didn’t want to give him. Musk says that open AI is greedy and should open up its models.
As you can imagine, the lawsuit kicked off an absolute hornet nest of activity over on social media and not just amongst the rank and file Tech workers out there, but among some of the biggest and most powerful and wealthiest names in all of Technology. On one hand, fod kosla of Coos Adventures, an open AI backer, called the lawsuits, effectively a distraction and said that they were powered by sour grapes and then Mark andrees of Andre Horowitz may have heard of. It said that venod was trying to make it harder to make open- Source AI software, and then there was meta’s AI leader who said hey. I think that open source is the best way to make AI products that are competitive with nation states and other companies, essentially how to build and regulate. Ai is just not settled. Part of that hinges on whether or not AI models are freely available or closed to external interrogation, with Founders and investors lining up on both sides of the argument.
In addition to open AI, Google and Amazon and others are Building closed, AI models and then on the other side, there are startups that are open, like mistol in France and even big Tech names like meta now. Open AI is worth tens of billions of dollars, and some of these companies are pretty valuable as well. So investors on all sides have a lot writing on the outcomes. Now what about the rest of us? Well, it’s not really clear.
Some people in Tech think that we really do have to be cautious here and they’re doing that in good faith. Other people say that if we slow down AI development, it’s tent amount to murder. What I know is that it’s going to be a loud and rockus year, because there are a billion dooll bets at play and that’s why the Venture capitalists are once again fighting .