Meta’s Next Chapter: Musk’s Input?

0:00With the insane amount of money in the AI ecosystem right now, I think it's no shock or surprise that there's also an insane amount of business drama. And the latest in this never-ending saga, it feels like, of finger-pointing and lawsuits is actually happening between OpenAI and Meta. OpenAI's lawyers have started to question Meta's role in something that I think they felt a little threatened by. Earlier this year, Elon Musk made a bid to buy OpenAI because of their fiduciary duty. He said that they, you know, had an obligation to sell for his price. There was a lot of drama. Sam Altman responded.

0:36Anyways, what's interesting today, though, is in all of the ongoing lawsuits between Elon Musk and OpenAI, it seems that Meta may have actually been involved in that bid. OpenAI is suing their lawyers for more information to see if Zuckerberg was making a back channel deal with Elon Musk and all this. We're going to get into all the drama today. Before we did, I wanted to mention, if you want to try any of the AI models that I talk about on the show, I talk about dozens. I mean, we have OpenAI, we have Grok, we have Llama that we're going to be talking about today. If you want to try any of those, I'd love for you to try my own startup.

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1:33It's AIbox.ai. All right, let's get into what's going on with OpenAI. OpenAI right now, they're asking Meta basically to produce evidence related to any sort of coordination that they were doing with Elon Musk and XAI when they did basically this bid to buy the company. Earlier this year, Elon Musk, I think this was back in February, he said, look, I will give you$97.4 billion to buy OpenAI. And at the time, OpenAI, you know, this was an unsolicited offer. So OpenAI turned him down. Sam Altman said something on X basically to the point that he was like, oh, you know, like, I don't want you, like, you don't need to buy OpenAI, but I'll be happy to buy Twitter for$9 billion if you want.

2:18So, you know, he's kind of like, look, for a tenth of the price, I'll buy Twitter. And I think this is kind of because Twitter's valuation had been going down since the acquisition. In any case, I think that I think that this is definitely kind of the start of all of this drama. And that's where a lot of people thought it ended. But apparently it goes a lot further because Meta may have been involved and OpenAI seems to think this is this is a big issue. So OpenAI's lawyers said that they discovered that Elon Musk communicated with Meta about this purchase of ChatGPT. and basically about, quote, potential financing arrangements or investments.

2:51So pretty much Elon Musk allegedly went over to Zuckerberg and was like, hey, let's get together. We could go buy OpenAI. We'll fund this thing. We'll put the money together and, I don't know, split it or whatever happens to it. And at the time, Meta was incredibly heavily invested in open source. So I imagine they'd probably try to be open source. They'd also stick the technology, I'm assuming, into Meta. Elon Musk had a lot of use cases with putting it into Grok and making his own chat model on his own social media platform. So I think that's kind of where he would have focused as well. Of course, his drama and beef with Sam Altman, I'm sure he would have been thrilled to kind of like take over the company.

3:22So this did not happen. And what's interesting is OpenAI and asking Meta's lawyers about basically what's going on here. Meta objected to the initial subpoena that was submitted in July. And now OpenAI's lawyers are trying to get a court order to actually get any sort of evidence related to that. OpenAI is also asking the court for any of Meta's documents and communications related to quote, any actual or potential restructuring or recapitalization of OpenAI. And of course, the core of this is Elon Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI. So it's really interesting to see the drama here. It goes beyond Elon Musk.

3:55I guess a lot of people are jealous. And I mean, you see a company grows as fast as OpenAI today with over 700 million weekly active users like this is a absolute giant. A spokesperson for Meta, Andy Stone, basically said that OpenAI is filing, he kind of pointed to a part of opening eyes filings which says that neither meta or zuckerberg signed musk's letter or intent to acquire the chat like open ai um so he they're like you know give us all your documents on what you guys said about it and he's like look zuckerberg never actually signed any letters so you guys have no evidence and you guys even admit that but i mean i think they want the juice they want all the they want the tea and and all the juicy info about what zuckerberg probably said in this so meta didn't say anything else other than that other than saying, Zuck, we're never signed anything.

4:40I think right now, this is obviously coming in, like as the backdrop to this massive fight between Musk and Meta. Musk put a lot of money into this, and Meta has significantly invested into all of their own AI models. In 2023, Meta executives were really obsessed about developing an AI model that could beat OpenAI's GPT-4. And so I think this is, you know, if they felt like it was slipping away, they're like, maybe we could buy it. And it seems like that's long gone because by, you know, early this year, Zuckerberg apparently is super frustrated that his model has fallen behind and maybe he let it fall behind because he thought he was going to be able to buy it.

5:15I don't really know, but you've seen him going on a massive tear spending billions of dollars. He's really upped the pressure. He also poached a bunch of top open AI leading researchers. So he got Shengizhou, who's a co-creator of ChatGPT, who now leads the research efforts at the new AI unit of Meta Super intelligence labs. It's the research unit. And Meta also invested about$14 billion in scale AI. They took the CEO over to lead basically Meta's overall AI model. So I think right now, it is not very clear how far the talks between Musk and Zuckerberg were, if this was, you know, just a partnership between them, or if they were really trying to, you know, collude to shut down open AI.

5:57But two years ago, Musk said that he would, you know, physically fight Mark Zuckerberg in a cage match this is after mark zuckerberg came out with threads which is competitor twitter the uh the silicon valley drama never ends the cage match never actually happened i think elon musk has a bunch of back problems anyways and zuckerberg's actually a pretty uh lethal fighter so i i think that uh it's probably for the best but in any case uh it's really interesting to see i'll definitely keep you up to date on all of the drama if we find out uh how deep this collusion was it seems like OpenAI was quite offended by all of it.

6:29So very interesting to see what goes on in this whole story. Anyways, thanks so much for tuning into the podcast today. If you enjoyed the episode, make sure to leave a rating and review. I read them all. I really appreciate them. And basically, it helps the podcast get shown to more incredible people like yourself. So thanks so much for tuning in. Make sure to check out AIbox.ai if you want to try all the top models in the world in one place for 40 bucks a month. And I'll catch you in the next episode.