In an interview at the AI Action Summit in Paris on Tuesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman dismissed Elon Musk’s unsolicited $97.4 billion bid for OpenAI’s nonprofit as “an attempt to slow [OpenAI] down.”
“[Musk] obviously is a competitor,” Altman said. “He’s raised a lot of money for [his AI company] xAI, and they’re trying to compete with us from a technological perspective.”
Altman went on to quip, “I think [Musk’s] whole life is from a position of insecurity […] I don’t think he’s a happy person.”
Altman almost immediately shot down Musk’s offer for OpenAI’s nonprofit in a public post on Monday, and it seems increasingly likely that OpenAI’s board of directors will formally reject the bid. But it may not happen right away. In an interview on Tuesday, Larry Summers, an OpenAI board member, said he hadn’t received “any formal communication [about the bid] of any kind outside of media reports.”