Elon Musk reportedly working on an AI product to compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT

The Yahoo Finance Live team breaks down reports of Elon Musk venturing into the artificial intelligence space as a means to compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Video Transcript

DAVE BRIGGS: All right, turning now to Elon Musk and the Musk Minute. A new report from the Financial Times says Elon is working on an AI startup to compete with OpenAI, which he co-founded. He's reportedly been building a team of researchers and engineers. And according to the story, Musk has brought up thousands of NVIDIA processors, driving the stock off the lows of the session. Rachelle, what are your thoughts?

RACHELLE AKUFFO: So I'm curious about this because, obviously, Elon Musk was one of the people who was saying, look, we need to slow down some of the developments we're seeing in generative AI, sort of take that six-month pause. He was one of many CEOs who signed on to this. So curious to see now he's still exploring those options while still having those concerns. And then what does this mean? Could we be seeing Skynet yet? We know he likes his robot, so if you combine the robotics and the AI, obviously, still very early days, based on this Financial Times report, but an interesting development, to say the least.

DAVE BRIGGS: Yeah, my thoughts exactly. My initial reaction was, do as I say, not as I do. Elon Musk once again compromising something he just laid out for them, which is that pause he asked everyone to take on the industry. Now, he was talking about those more powerful than ChatGPT 4. But it does seem, at the very least, ironic for the co-founder of OpenAI and the man who just asked for an industry-wide pause to now be jumping into that very same pool. But this is pretty consistent with Elon Musk going past.

Now, I should say that Sam Altman did comment on that letter just yesterday at MIT. And he said, "It was missing most technical nuance about where we need to pause." The letter, I don't think, was the optimum way to address the concerns that Altman acknowledges there are about OpenAI. But, look, I don't doubt for any reason that Elon Musk could have potential in this sector. But does he need another project right now, Rachelle?

RACHELLE AKUFFO: Well, I mean, so far, I mean, as we saw when he took on Twitter, Tesla shareholders weren't thrilled about it. That did seem to at least temper off as, you know, Tesla was having these high production targets, meeting those targets. That did seem to die down. Perhaps this is part of the X everything app. Perhaps it'll all tie in. He is making a lot of moves here. As always, you hope it's not a distraction.

But as you mentioned, still very early days here, but yeah, seeing him getting his hands on something else when he's already making Tesla shareholders nervous after the Twitter buy, he's hedging his bets. No one wants to get left behind in this AI space.

DAVE BRIGGS: Yeah, it is, once again, the fire hose approach for Elon Musk.