Elon Musk's xAI goes after Sam Altman's OpenAI

The billionaires' fight is turning nasty.

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An underappreciated force behind great technological change is intense and petty rivalry. In the "war of the currents" in the late 19th century, Thomas Edison electrocuted stray animals to discredit Nikola Tesla. A century later, Steve Jobs traded insults with Bill Gates during a battle between Apple and Microsoft. Even Silicon Valley, a satirical HBO series, starts with a feud - and the priceless quip: "These are billionaires, Richard. Humiliating each other is worth more to them than we will make in a lifetime."

In the world of generative artificial intelligence (AI), the scrap between Mr Elon Musk and Mr Sam Altman is in the same league. It is both silly and captivating. Silly because they insult each other, try to discredit each other's chatbots and fight over who meant what almost a decade ago when they co-founded OpenAI.

Captivating because, fueled by grievance, Mr Musk has created xAI, maker of a series of large language models (LLMs) called Grok. It has its sights set on OpenAI, now run by Mr Altman, which became wildly successful with the release of ChatGPT two years ago. While OpenAI was last valued at US$157 billion (S$211 billion), xAI, which is less than two years old, is already reported to be worth US$50 billion.