OpenAI is reportedly working on its own social media platform to rival the likes of X

Just a day after the launch of GPT-4.1, The Verge is now reporting that OpenAI is quietly working on its own X-style social network. It's still in the early days, but the internal prototype apparently leans heavily into ChatGPT’s image generation and features a social-style feed. Sam Altman has been poking around for outside opinions on it.

So far, it’s not even clear if this social network will end up as a new app or if it'll just fold into ChatGPT itself.

Now, this whole move is obviously going to fuel the already messy rivalry between Sam Altman and Elon Musk. Back in February, Musk made a $97.4 billion offer to buy OpenAI, which Altman publicly rejected with some shade:

To back up a bit, Musk originally co-founded OpenAI with Altman in 2015 but left in 2018. Since then, he's taken plenty of shots at the company, accusing it of abandoning its nonprofit roots, getting too cozy with Microsoft, and more recently, dragging the AI lab into court.

On the flip side, OpenAI has countersued Musk, claiming he tried to take over the company to control its tech. It's gotten messy fast, with both sides throwing legal and philosophical punches.

Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion, rebranded it as X, and then stuffed Grok, his AI chatbot from xAI, right into the platform.

Grok pulls from X’s firehose of real-time content, giving Musk’s AI operation a direct stream of the internet’s collective thoughts (and chaos). Meta is doing something similar with its Llama models, training them on piles of user data from Facebook and Instagram. And now, OpenAI seems to be angling for its own data stream rather than relying on secondhand info.

The angle here seems to be less about copying X and more about getting real-time content to train AI on. One source said:

The Grok integration with X has made everyone jealous. Especially how people create viral tweets by getting it to say something stupid.

Of course, this whole project could end up as vaporware. OpenAI is juggling a lot lately: new models, ongoing lawsuits, and questions about how fast it’s scaling.