Amid the ongoing battle between OpenAI"s Sam Altman and rival Elon Musk, Altman, while praising Musk as an entrepreneur, labelled him a "bully" for picking fights with tech leaders like Amazon"s Bezos and Meta"s Zuckerberg. Altman further criticized Musk"s xAI for directly competing with OpenAI"s ChatGPT with its through its chatbot, Grok AI, which was recently made available to more users. As tension rise, both leaders are seeking for new ways to dominate the rapidly evolving AI landscape.
In an episode on the Bari Weiss podcast, Altman discussed his feud with Musk. Earlier this year, Musk filed a lawsuit against OpenAI claiming to breach its own contract by trying to become a for-profit company rather than a non-profit organization. Then recently, Musk filed a new motion in the California US District Court to stop OpenAI from becoming for-profit company.
Speaking about Musk, Altman said, "he’s also clearly a bully, and he’s also someone who clearly likes to get in fights. Right now, it’s me. It’s been Bezos, Gates, Zuckerberg, lots of other people. And I think fundamentally, this is about OpenAI doing really well. Elon cares about doing really well." Furthermore, Altman also revealed that Musk once advocated for OpenAI to become a for-profit organization and even proposed merging it with Tesla.
Despite these challenges, OpenAI raised $6.6 billion in funding in October, escalating its valuation to $157 billion. Now, Altman is focussed on innovation. On Christmas Eve, he sought advice (via Business Insider) from his X followers on what OpenAI should build or fix in the coming year.
what would you like openai to build/fix in 2025?
— Sam Altman (@sama) December 25, 2024
OpenAI CEO received quite a number of responses to his post on X and here are some of the standout responses that seems to have caught Altman"s eye so far.
- Family accounts: A user suggested creating family-friendly accounts with parental controls. allowing children to safely explore AI while parents set boundaries. Altman praised this idea and called it good.
Family accounts. Let me create accounts for my kids with guard rails. Let their curiosity take off, but within reasonable limits, as determined by the parent.
— JΔCΞ (@P4LSEC) December 25, 2024
Maybe we could even get insights about our kids from their usage! - Better voice chats: Someone suggested Altman to improve ChatGPT"s voice feature, which has faced criticism in the past for interrupting users during conversations. Altman seems to have given a nod to improve this feature as he claimed it was a "good point."
better turn detection for voice chats.
— Florian S (@airesearch12) December 25, 2024
it sucks that you can"t just silently think for 5 seconds without being interrupted - Enhance Sora: Multiple users urged Altman to improve Sora, OpenAI"s text-to-video generation AI tool. After officially launching on December 9, users have been liking it, but want more features and improvements in the quality of video creation. It appears that improvements for Sora where in the pipeline, as Altman commented "coming."
Just make sora really good
— Ti Morse (@ti_morse) December 25, 2024
With these suggestions, OpenAI seems ready to elevate user experience by introducing new features and fixing already existing ones in the coming year.