Elon Musk seeks to buy rival's AI platform

New York (CNN) — Elon Musk, while taking a wrecking ball to the federal establishment, has also been scheming to try to wrest control of the AI startup he co-founded with Sam Altman, his former associate and current rival in the Techno-Authoritarian Game of Thrones that is the second Trump administration.

The unsolicited $97 billion bid for OpenAI is, like so much Musk maneuvering, almost certainly a stunt. Sure, he’d love to own the technology behind ChatGPT, and Musk claims to be putting up serious money on the table to try to get it. But OpenAI is unlikely to sell; Altman almost immediately shut it down with a “no thank you” tweet on Monday.

Which would seem to be the end of it? But if so, why go through the hassle of wrangling investors, hiring lawyers and putting out a press release?

Certainly, there’s some element of dog-park dynamics here, where Musk is simply peeing on Altman’s fire hydrant. But I think there are a couple of other motives at play.

A) Musk just slowed Altman down. In going public with the bid, Musk has potentially made Altman’s No. 1 mission — freeing OpenAI from its non-profit prison — much harder. Without getting into the weeds of OpenAI’s ridiculously complex ownership flowchart, suffice it to say: There is a for-profit entity (the thing investors are salivating over) that’s currently controlled by a nonprofit board.

Altman is under a ton of pressure from investors to convert the whole operation into a for-profit venture, which means compensating the non-profit. Very publicly, and at potentially very little cost (if he doesn’t end up buying OpenAI), Musk just raised the floor for the nonprofit’s valuation at a time when OpenAI is burning through cash.

At an AI summit in Paris on Tuesday, Altman seemed to shrug at Musk’s effort — the latest in a series — to throttle OpenAI.

“I wish he would just compete by building a better product,” Altman said in an interview with Bloomberg TV.

B) Musk actually does want to control the future of AI. If there’s even a slight chance Musk could get his hands on OpenAI’s market-leading technology, talent and brand power, he’s probably going to do it. He could, in theory, take over OpenAI, merge it with his own xAI lab and create a behemoth that would absolutely dominate an increasingly crowded field.

All of that would be made easier under the current political administration, which shares his aversion to regulatory oversight and is allowing him to gut the very regulators that oversee his businesses.

At the same summit where Altman spoke on Tuesday, Vice President JD Vance laid out the administration’s desire to see a more “deregulatory flavor” in conversations around AI — while setting up the straw man that “excessive regulation” could kill AI “just as it’s taking off.”

Of course, let’s not let Vance’s rhetoric cloud our understanding of the state of the industry. There’s nothing “excessive” happening in AI regulation, because AI is almost completely unregulated. Former President Joe Biden signed an executive action that attempted to minimize AI’s national security risks and prevent discrimination by AI systems — rules that were largely ineffective, and Trump repealed last month. If the industry is being choked by anything, it’s its own technological shortcomings and inability to make products that a) work reliably and b) people actually want.

As AI researcher Gary Marcus noted Tuesday, Vance’s “warning about a bogeyman” is a hint at how the White House (with Musk’s blessing) is going to approach AI: “The new administration will do everything in its power to protect businesses, and nothing to protect individuals.”

Which brings us back to the Musk-Altman feud: This isn’t a good versus evil battle. It’s not as if Altman is some antidote to Musk’s megalomania (for all we know, he’s just a younger, more charming version of it). But if there’s a side to root for, it’s the side of struggle. Competition is good. Consolidation in an industry as young as AI is a recipe for unchecked power, and Musk certainly doesn’t need any more of that.

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