In what we can only assume is a potential thumb in the Eye of Elon Musk, Sam Altmans Open AI is reportedly considering building a social network, possibly inside chat.
This comes via a new report from The Verge, which claims this week that the social network, which may be building on top of Openais AI services, is only in the “early stages.” Still, it could create Chatgpt and other Openai platforms for a head-to-head match with GROK, a generative AI platform built on top of Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter).
There are essentially no details about what this social platform can look like, and Openai has little experience with divisible content outside of what its models can generate and what you can see in the Sora (video loo system) of other people’s creations.
Take it, x
The fact that this rumor is out there may have little to do with the development behind the scenes and more to do with Altman’s running battle with former partner Musk.
The couple founded Openai together before Musk went away in 2018. He has since criticized and sued Openai, among other things, to become at least a pre-profit device (see Openai’s partnership with Microsoft and Rise of Copilot).
Let’s assume for a moment that this is real. Why would Openai want to build a social network? With a word: data.
If millions flow to the platform and then start, I assume they share AI-Generated Memes on it, they will drop a ton of rich data in the Openai system. If users allow, future versions of the GPT model could be trained on it. Real data and activities that show how real people think, talk, act, create, etc., can be invaluable to a young generative model.
Social timing is everything
I wonder if this may have been more sensible a year or two ago when Musk took over Twitter, transformed it into X, removed many of the protective content room frames and made it a social media shellscape. It was at that moment that Meta’s threads first rushed in. It was followed in the notoriousness of Bluesky. Both of them are distributed social networks, which means no one owns your identity or data.
Their growth has been remarkable and it contradicts X’s fortunes. Depending on who you are talking to, active user growth is stagnant or shrunken. But that does not mean that the public’s appetite on several alternative platforms is growing. The growth of the threads has subsided and Bluesky is relatively small compared to x and threads.
The action is mostly on image and video-based social platforms such as Snapchat, Tiktok, Instagram wheels and YouTube shorts. The Verge report does not mention video that makes us assume that this may be another micro-blogging-style network-something that no one necessarily needs or may want.
Still, as an opportunity to cause Elon Musk a little more Agita, it’s probably a worthy trial balloon from Altman.
