In an interview with Bloomberg during the Paris AI Summit, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman commented on his response to Elon Musk's offer to sell the company. Asked by the host whether he believes Musk made the offer because of his lack of confidence in his own AI startup xAI, Altman replied: "Musk's whole life is from a position of insecurity… I feel for the guy… I think he’s not, like, a happy person".
According to Altman, OpenAI is not for sale, and the company's mission has no price. He also noted that Elon Musk is only trying to slow down the company's development in every possible way.
"I think he’s probably just trying to slow us down. Він, очевидно, конкурент. He's working hard and he's raised a lot of money for xAI, and they're trying to compete with us from a technological point of view, getting a product to the market. And I wish he would just compete by building a better product, instead there were a lot of lawsuits and all kinds of other crazy things. But we'll just try to put our heads down and keep working," Altman said.
Altman also touched upon the topic of infrastructure for AI development. According to him, at the Paris AI Summit, the company received many requests to create Stargate in different countries.
"People are still thinking about the security of AI, but now they are saying: okay, this technology is here, it has an incredible impact, we have to move it. Maybe the most common question I've been asked is: can you do Stargate in my country? We need the infrastructure here, we want to do it, can you help?" said the head of OpenAI.
However, Altman did not mention France's initiative to allocate 109 billion euros and 1 gigawatt of nuclear energy to artificial intelligence infrastructure, as well as the EU's plans to invest 200 billion euros in AI, which could be a serious competition for the Stargate project.
Earlier, it was reported that Elon Musk and a consortium of investors offered $97.4 billion for OpenAI. In response, Altman joked about the possibility of buying social network X for $9.74 billion, which Musk acquired for $44 billion in 2022.