Sam Altman, left, and Elon Musk.
Muhammed Selim Korkutata | Anadolu | Getty Images
Sam Altman has dismissed longtime rival Elon Musk’s warnings that OpenAI is set to dominate Microsoft, after the companies announced that OpenAI’s latest AI model will be incorporated into Microsoft products.
On Thursday, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced that OpenAI’s GPT-5 service would be launching across platforms including Microsoft 365 Copilot, Copilot, GitHub Copilot, and Azure AI Foundry — prompting a response from Musk that “OpenAI is going to eat Microsoft alive.”
Nadella sought to downplay the issue. “People have been trying for 50 years and that’s the fun of it! Each day you learn something new, and innovate, partner, and compete,” he said on X, also expressing excitement for Musk’s own Grok 4 chatbot, which is available on Azure on a limited preview.
OpenAI CEO Altman shared his own repartee on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” Friday, saying, when asked of Musk’s input, “You know, I don’t think about him that much.”
He went on to question the meaning of Musk’s statements, also noting of the tech billionaire, “I thought he was just, like, tweeting all day [on X] about how much OpenAI sucks, and our model is bad, and, you know, [we’re] not gonna be a good company and all that.”
CNBC has reached out to Musk-owned X for comment.
Altman and Musk have frequently exchanged barbs as part of a long-storied feud that dates back to their disagreement over the ultimate mission of OpenAI, which they co-founded in 2015 as a nonprofit AI research lab.
OpenAI has since been seeking to convert into a for-profit entity and capitalize on meteoric demand for its viral ChatGPT product, with Microsoft stepping in as a top backer. Musk previously filed — and has since dropped — a lawsuit against the company, citing breach of contract.
Earlier this year, the Tesla boss also led a consortium that offered to acquire the nonprofit that controls OpenAI for $97.4 billion. Altman declined the proposal with a curt “no thank you but we will buy twitter for $9.74 billion if you want” on social media. He separately told CNBC at the time that he thought the takeover offer was an effort to “slow down a competitor.”
