AI: The war of words between the CEO of OpenAI and Elon Musk

Between AI ChatGPT and Grok, the rivalry has now burst into public view. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has publicly taken a swipe at Grok, the chatbot created by Elon Musk’s startup xAI. According to him, Grok indulges in “boomer humor” and is a “waste of time”. He posted these comments on Thursday, November 9th, the day when OpenAI was launching a new version of ChatGPT. The mission of the creator of ChatGPT is clear: to prevent Grok from stealing the show from ChatGPT.

Sam Altman Tries to Diminish the Popularity of Grok, Elon Musk’s AI

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, announced the new version of the ChatGPT chatbot, an update that allows the creation of personalized versions of ChatGPT named GPT. He made the announcement by posting a screenshot of the conversational AI on November 9th, just a few days after Elon Musk’s Chatbot Grok was launched.

Altman took the opportunity to criticize Elon Musk’s chatbot Grok. In the screenshot, he asked the ChatGPT Builder to “become a chatbot that responds with boomer humor, awkwardly and shockingly to make people laugh”.

The AI replied: “Great, the chatbot is ready! It’s called Grok. How do you like the name, or would you prefer something else?” This exchange of barbs comes as Chatbot Grok continues to cause a sensation, making headlines for several days due to its distinctiveness from existing conversational AI models.

Grok, the new AI prodigy, indeed offers responses laced with humor and wit. However, Sam Altman is not prepared to let Elon Musk outshine him in the field of artificial intelligence.

GPTs can save a lot of effort: pic.twitter.com/VFIrGzPuMN

— Sam Altman (@sama) November 10, 2023

Musk’s Response and Grok’s Performance

The war of words between Sam Altman and Elon Musk has escalated following Musk’s response to Altman’s critiques. In a defiant move, Musk shared a reply purportedly written by Grok. This response, mixing humor and sarcasm, began with a whimsical rhyme linking “GPT-4” with the English word “snore”, before veering into an odd metaphor involving a “screen door on a submarine”. However, Grok’s humor quickly turned more bitingly satirical, morphing into a diatribe where it’s suggested humor is banned at OpenAI, with a sharp jibe aimed at GPT-4.

Beyond these heated exchanges, the question of Grok’s performance remains open. Elon Musk introduced Grok as being superior to ChatGPT. Designed to generate humorous texts reminiscent of the style of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, the famous science-fiction work by Douglas Adams, Grok aspires to set a benchmark in the realm of humoristic AI.

Yet, an objective comparison between Grok and ChatGPT is still uncertain. Reliable and recognized benchmarks to evaluate large language models (LLMs) and, particularly, for humor are lacking. While OpenAI has released several studies on the capabilities of ChatGPT, the technical details regarding Grok are less documented, though Musk claims Grok surpasses the performance of GPT-3.5, an earlier version of the LLM behind ChatGPT.

The rivalry between two of the AI heavyweights, Elon Musk and Sam Altman, was born when, under Altman’s leadership, OpenAI changed its status by joining forces with Microsoft. Let’s hope this rivalry does not lead to an uncontrolled escalation of AI research, as society is not yet prepared for it.