In what we can only assume is a potential thumb in the eye of Elon Musk, Sam Altman’s Open AI is reportedly considering building a social network, possibly inside ChatGPT.
This comes via a new report from The Verge, which claims this week that the social network possibly being built on top of OpenAI’s AI services is only in the “early stages.” Still, it could set up ChatGPT and other OpenAI platforms for a head-to-head battle 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 might look like, and OpenAI has little experience with shareable content outside of what its models can generate and what you can see in Sora (the video generation system) of other people’s creations.
Take that, X
The fact that this rumor is out there might have little to do with behind-the-scenes development and more to do with Altman’s ongoing battle with former partner Musk.
The pair founded OpenAI together before Musk walked away in 2018. He has since criticized and sued OpenAI for, among other things, becoming, in part at least, a for-profit entity (see OpenAI’s partnership with Microsoft and the rise of Copilot).
Let’s assume for a moment, though, that this is real. Why would OpenAI want to build a social network? In a word: data.
If millions flock to the platform and then start, I guess, sharing AI-generated memes on it, they’ll be dropping a ton of rich data into the OpenAI system. If users allow it, 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 might’ve made more sense a year or two ago when Musk took over Twitter, transformed it into X, removed many of the protective content guardrails, and turned it into a social media hellscape. It was in that moment that Meta’s Threads first rushed in. It was followed in notoriety by Bluesky. Both of them are distributed social networks, meaning no one owns your identity or your data.
Their growth has been remarkable, and it stands in contrast to X’s fortunes. Depending on who you talk to, active user growth is stagnant or shrinking. But that doesn’t mean the public’s appetite for more alternative platforms is growing. Threads’ growth has slowed, and Bluesky is relatively small compared to X and Threads.
The action is mostly on image and video-based social platforms like Snapchat, TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts. The Verge report does not mention video, which leads us to assume this could be another micro-blogging-style network – something no one necessarily needs or, perhaps, wants.
Even so, as an opportunity to cause Elon Musk a little more agita, it’s probably a worthy trial balloon from Altman.
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lance.ulanoff@futurenet.com (Lance Ulanoff)
