The company also recently hired two former DeepMind researchers.
More than a month after hiring a couple of former DeepMind
researchers, Twitter is reportedly moving forward with an in-house
artificial intelligence project. According to Business Insider, Elon Musk
recently bought 10,000 GPUs for use at one of the company’s two remaining
data centers. A source told the outlet the purchase shows Musk is
“committed” to the effort, particularly given the fact there would be little
reason for Twitter to spend so much money on datacenter-grade GPUs if it
didn’t plan to use them for AI work.
The project reportedly involves the creation of a generative AI
that the company would train on its own massive trove of data. It’s unclear
how Twitter would utilize the technology. Insider suggests a generative AI
could augment the platform’s search functionality or assist the company in
rebuilding its advertising business. In any case, the report colors Musk’s
recent decision to sign an open letter calling for a six-month pause on AI
development.
Musk has been a vocal critic of OpenAI, the
artificial intelligence research organization he co-founded in 2015. “I’m
still confused as to how a non-profit to which I donated ~$100M somehow
became a $30B market cap for-profit. If this is legal, why doesn’t everyone
do it?” Musk said in one of his recent Twitter missives against the lab’s
for-profit subsidiary, OpenAI Limited Partnership.
However, a recent report from Semafor suggests his feud with
OpenAI is more personal. In 2018, Musk reportedly told Sam Altman, one his
fellow co-founders at OpenAI, the lab was falling too far behind Google.
Musk then suggested that he should be the one to run the firm, a proposal
Altman and OpenAI’s other founders rejected.
The power
struggle led to Musk’s departure from OpenAI, though publicly both parties
maintain Musk left due to a conflict of interest involving Tesla. At the
time, OpenAI said the billionaire would continue to fund its research.
However, according to Semafor, Musk’s payments stopped after his departure –
despite a promise to provide the firm with roughly $1 billion. The sudden
shortfall left OpenAI scrambling to raise cash. In 2019, the organization
announced it was creating a for-profit subsidiary to secure the capital it
needed to fund its work. That same year, the firm announced a $1 billion
investment from Microsoft. When OpenAI opened ChatGPT to the public in
November and the chatbot began to dominate headlines, Musk was reportedly
“furious.” One month later, he cut OpenAI’s access to Twitter’s “firehose”
of data. And now it would appear he wants to compete against his old
organization head-on.
