Would you stop using OpenAI ChatGPT or API if Elon Musk bought it?

The AI beat is never dull, and today was certainly no exception. The Wall Street Journal reported that a group of private investors, led by Elon Musk the multi-company owner, had made a bid for the company. OpenAI’s board of directors, which is a non-profit organization, will pay $97.4 billion (19459071) to acquire the for profit subsidiary of the company run by Sam Altman, the former co-founder and now rival of OpenAI.

Putting the messy and long history between the two men aside, Musk’s stated desire to acquire another company on top of the six he currently owns or operates (SpaceX Tesla Starlink Neuralink X AI xAI) was to make OpenAI Open Source, in line with its original founding mission of delivering AI and artificial general intelligence for all. Musk told the Journal that it was time to bring OpenAI back to its open-source, safety focused roots. “We will ensure that this happens.”

This takeover bid is also a personal one for Musk, who co-founded and bankrolled the company with his partner in 2015. Altman and nine others decided to Exit the venture in 2018only to become one of its most vocal critics and rivals. He founded his xAI startup 2023, and is building a massive AI supercluster of graphics processor units (GPUs), known as Colossus.

Untangling Musk’s motivations

But the bid to control OpenAI seems to be a tacit admittance. Musk and his collaborators are not able to win as many users despite their rapid and hefty investments in a rival — the Grok chatbot that is baked into the social network X and the Grok-2 large model and API for third-party software developers.

This would also suggest that Grok-3 — reportedly in the training phase, and which pseudonymous AI rumor reports on X have hyped up as industry-leading— is Altman himself dismissed the idea of Musk acquiring OpenAI on Musk’s social networking site X. Musk replied by writing : “No thank you, but we can buy twitter for $9.74 Billion if you wish.” Another post calls Altman “Scam Altman.” The media has suggested that Musk’s bidcould have an effect on the market. OpenAI’s last round of funding valued the company at $157 billion. This is much lower than what current investors paid for the company.

Not out of question

But it’s not impossible that Musk could be successful with this takeover bid. After all, his bid to take over Twitter (and ultimately change the name to X) was also deemed as a longshot by some in the press — until it happened for real, and arguably changed the course of history by promoting more posts from conservative and freewheeling influencers and paying subscribers over the verified journalists of yore, influencing the 2024 election and a myriad other global events and individual perceptions/worldviews.

This also raises the issue, especially in light his controversial Nazi salutes on Trump’s second inaugural and general support for Far-right politics worldwide : If Musk succeeds in taking over OpenAI would you continue to use their products (ChatGPT Sora DALL-E 3 its APIs, and various other models and service) or switch to another AI provider? After all, a few people and organizations have left X in favor of competing short social posting platforms BlueSky and Threads (19459071) in the wake Musk’s takeover and his general moves to support Trump and right-wing politicians.

While Musk has promoted political and viewpoints I personally find abhorrent, his Grok AI has enabled a more freewheeling, freeform expression than other competing AI models. This is how I created Altman’s likeness at the top of this article, for example. This is a laudable stance in my opinion, and could indicate that a takeover by OpenAI would lead to less censored/restricted model, which I support.

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