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Evening Standard
Evening Standard
Technology
Martyn Landi

OpenAI is building a social network – reports

The OpenAI logo on a mobile phone (Peter Morgan/AP) - (AP)

ChatGPT-maker OpenAI is working on its own social media platform, similar to X, it has been reported.

The AI giant is said to be in the early stages of the project, which is focused on ChatGPT’s image generation tool that would also have a social feed.

According to The Verge, the company has developed an internal prototype on which chief executive Sam Altman has been privately asking outsiders for feedback, but concrete plans for the project remain unclear.

Any release of a social media product by OpenAI would likely intensify the already bitter rivalry between Mr Altman and Elon Musk.

The Tesla and SpaceX boss was a co-founder at OpenAI, but left and has since sued the company, claiming it has betrayed its not-for-profit founding principals.

Mr Musk also made a 97.4 billion dollar (£73.3 billion) offer to buy the AI firm in February, a move which was quickly rebuffed by Mr Altman, who quipped that OpenAI could “buy Twitter for 9.74 billion dollars (£7.33 billion) if you want”.

OpenAI has since also countersued Mr Musk, claiming he has used “bad-faith tactics” by trying to slow down the ChatGPT-maker’s growth for his own benefit.

Mr Musk has his own AI chatbot, Grok, built by his AI start-up xAI, which can be accessed inside social media platform X.

The Verge report suggests part of the desire for OpenAI to add a social feed is the unique, real-time data it would provide the firm to help train its AI models.

Rivals X and Meta, who are also moving heavily into the AI space, either point to content from their platforms in results or use the vast trove of data its feeds offer to train its models.

Earlier this month, OpenAI completed a new, record-breaking funding round of more than 40 billion dollars (£30 billion), which valued the firm at 300 billion dollars (£226 billion).

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