The co-founder of ChatGPT is escalating his feud with Elon Musk by launching a new social media platform to rival X.
Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI, is said to be exploring plans for a website based on its newly released AI image generator.
The plans, which were first reported by The Verge, mark the latest twist in the spat between the OpenAI founder and Mr Musk.
The pair co-founded OpenAI as a non-vprofit organisation in 2015, alongside funding from entrepreneur Peter Thiel and Amazon.
However, the two Silicon Valley tycoons subsequently clashed over plans to turn the company into a commercial business and Mr Musk left following a power struggle in 2018.
The Tesla founder sued OpenAI last year, claiming his former partners betrayed him by turning the company into a for-profit enterprise, in what he branded a “deceit of Shakespearean proportions”.
OpenAI has since issued a counter-claim against Mr Musk after accusing the billionaire of harassment.
Tensions escalated in February when the Tesla boss made an unsolicited offer to buy OpenAI for $97.4bn (£73bn).
Mr Altman responded: “No thank you but we will buy Twitter for $9.74bn if you want.”
The feud has also become increasingly personal after Mr Musk branded Mr Altman “swindly”.
The OpenAI boss hit back, saying Mr Musk’s “whole life is from a position of insecurity” and “I don’t think he’s a happy person”.
OpenAI’s potential move into social media comes after Mr Altman last month said the company’s new image-based AI programme was so popular that its servers were “melting”.
However, it has also sparked a backlash over copyright infringement after users began to easily mimic the distinctive aesthetic of Studio Ghibli, the Japanese animation studio behind films such as Spirited Away and Howl’s Moving Castle.
It is not clear whether OpenAI’s mooted social media platform would be released as a standalone app or integrated into ChatGPT, which is now the most downloaded app globally.
However, launching a social media network would give OpenAI access to first-party data that could be used to help train its AI model.
Mr Musk feeds posts from X into his Grok chatbot and recently merged the operations into one company, xAI, while Meta trains its Llama model on swathes of data from Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.
Any such move would also put OpenAI in more direct competition with Meta. After reports emerged earlier this year that Mr Zuckerberg’s company was planning a Meta AI app to compete with ChatGPT, Mr Altman responded: “Ok fine maybe we’ll do a social app.”
OpenAI last month closed a $40bn funding round led by Japanese investment giant SoftBank. The cash injection, which is the largest private tech funding round in history, valued the ChatGPT owner at $300bn.
