OpenAI wants to be a robot and further confront Musk

OpenAI co-founders Altman and Musk are increasingly attacking each other, and as mentioned in a previous Wall Street Sights article, their feud dates back 8 years.

Now it seems that "the good show has just been staged" between them.

OpenAI enters the field of Tesla robotics

According to media reports, OpenAI is making inroads into Tesla's robotics field and has invested in Norwegian humanoid robot company 1X.

On March 23, local time, Norwegian humanoid robot company 1X Technologies announced the completion of a $23.5 million Series A2 financing, led by OpenAI Venture Fund, along with the world-renowned asset management institution Tiger Global Fund, and a consortium of Norwegian investors such as Sandwater, Alliance Ventures and Skagerak Capital.

It is reported that 1X intends to use the funding to ramp up research and development of its upcoming bipedal robot model NEO, as well as mass production of its first commercial robot EVE in Norway and North America.

As soon as the news came out, it triggered the outside world's infinite reverie about the combination of GPT model and robot.

According to the official website, 1X, formerly known as Halodi Robotics, was founded in 2014 and produces robots that can imitate human movements and behavior, with more than 60 people in the company. 1X says its mission is to create robots with practical applications to increase the global workforce.

The question is, if you were Musk, how would you feel when you saw the news?

If ChatGPT and robots are compared to human brains and bodies, then OpenAI already has the strongest AI brain, and now it is entering the field of robotics... Musk is going to be challenged.

Musk plans to develop an alternative to ChatGPT from scratch

Musk tweeted in December that OpenAI-developed ChatGPT was "too good to be scary, and we're not far from dangerously powerful AI." ”

Just a month ago, it was reported that Musk planned to develop a ChatGPT alternative because he was not satisfied with OpenAI.

In fact, Musk began investing in AI very early:

In 2013, Musk personally invested in DeepMind;

In 2015, he also participated in OpenAI's crowdfunding launch and Vicarious' Series B financing.

In 2016, Musk founded NeuraLink, a brain-computer interface company.

Tesla also began laying out artificial intelligence early on. In 2013, Tesla began planning to enter autonomous driving after the market value exceeded $10 billion with the hot sale of Model S.

Until the Tesla AI Day held on August 19, 2021, Tesla's full-chain control of the "four elements" of autonomous driving has basically taken shape:

Using the "pure vision solution", the core algorithm is based on a deep neural network, trained by the Dojo supercomputer developed by itself in the cloud, and the self-developed FSD chip on the terminal processes the surrounding environment data in real time, identifies objects, predicts behavior, makes judgments, and finally controls vehicle actions to achieve automatic or semi-automatic "intelligent driving".

In order to accelerate the maturity of autonomous driving, Tesla launched the closed beta of FSD Beta in October 2020. At AI Day in 2022, Tesla gave a set of data: collected 4.8 million pieces of data, trained 75,778 neural network models, of which 281 models were actually used in Tesla vehicles, pushing FSD iterations of 35 versions.

Before disclosing the data, Musk made a statement in his opening remarks: Basically, I think we are the undisputed leader in real-world applications of AI.

However, after ChatGPT became popular all over the world, the credibility of this statement was clearly discounted. Even the Tesla humanoid robot Optimus, released last October, has recently become the backdrop for the global AI carnival.

Altman vs Musk

Musk has recently been bashing OpenAI on Twitter.

He was first publicly critical of OpenAI's restrictive security measures, and on February 17, he tweeted:

"OpenAI was created as an open-source (that's why I named it 'open' AI) nonprofit to compete with Google, but now it's a closed-source, profit-maximizing company that Microsoft actually controls. This is not what I want at all. ”

Then, on March 15, he tweeted:

"I'm still confused about how a nonprofit that I donated about $100 million could become a for-profit organization valued at $30 billion. If it's legal, why not let someone else do it? ”

Between the lines, Musk is angry.

Musk was one of the founders of OpenAI. Looking back at this history:

About 8 years ago, OpenAI was founded as a high-profile nonprofit with the backing of billionaire tech celebrities like Musk and Reid Hoffman, who pledged to invest $1 billion in groups. PS: Non-profit organizations are not unprofitable, but they do not pay dividends.

But Musk left OpenAI's board in 2018 with the stated reason at the time to avoid any conflict of interest with Tesla. But according to media reports last week, the real reason Musk's departure was the failure to seize power.

In early 2018, Musk told Altman, another founder of OpenAI, that he thought OpenAI had lagged badly behind Google and proposed that he take control of OpenAI and run it himself. But Altman and OpenAI's other founders rejected Musk's offer.

Altman was running YCombinator, a powerful startup incubator at the time. In addition to serving as an OpenAI director, he added the role of president to his title in 2018, tax filings show.

Musk didn't succeed in becoming the boss, and Musk simply ran out of money, and the roughly $1 billion he had promised to donate in the following years (he had already donated $100 million) stopped paying after he left.

The conflict also led to a public break between Musk and Altman.

Later, OpenAI quickly threw itself into Microsoft's arms, receiving a $1 billion investment (now about $13 billion) to pay for all the astronomical costs of training AI models on supercomputers.

In fact, the dispute between Musk and OpenAI has nothing to do with its status as a non-profit entity, but OpenAI is already someone else's AI, to be combined with someone else's robot... There seems to be a bit of a "feeling of loss of true love"...

Looking back at 2018, Musk faced other headaches: Tesla was still struggling to meet its Model 3 production goals, the stock price was falling, and the company was even on the verge of bankruptcy.

Now OpenAI has become a popular star company, and even left Google behind, which undoubtedly deeply stung Musk, who left that year, and now the most lively thing in the technology industry has nothing to do with him.

Most importantly, Musk may have been convinced that only he could truly safely usher in the era of artificial intelligence.

One more thing, Musk's love will Andrej Karpathy, former Tesla AI senior executive and former head of Autopilot, FSD and other projects, 7 months after leaving Tesla, announced his next job: joining OpenAI (again).

Musk: I'm sure everything will be fine

Then again, ChatGPT tells us that the development of artificial intelligence is always non-linear, and once the "singularity" approaches, the explosion will come at an unimaginable speed.

No one dares to say that Tesla's FSD Beta, which has been tested for more than two years, will not make a breakthrough in the near future, and this robot equipped with FSD chips is the same.

According to media reports last week, Shivon Zilis, director of operations at Neuralink, Musk's brain-computer interface company, has stepped down as director of OpenAI. Zilis gave birth to twins for Musk.

On Friday, Musk changed course and tweeted: "I'm sure everything will be fine." ”

He also sent out an emoji of Elmo, a cartoon character from the children's TV show Sesame Street, which read:

"I realized that artificial intelligence, the most powerful tool that mankind has ever created, is now in the hands of a ruthless monopoly."

Recently, Musk said in response to Twitter netizens' tweets that Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates (Bill Gates) still has a "limited understanding" of artificial intelligence.