Following Monday’s news that an Elon Musk and xAI-backed group offered OpenAI’s board $97.4 billion for control over the company, CEO Sam Altman has declared OpenAI “not for sale.” While the board will have to review the offer, it is unclear if they will seriously consider an off that effectively amounts to a hostile takeover of the company.
“Elon tries all sorts of things for a long time. This is the latest — you know, this week’s episode,” Altman said during a Bloomberg TV interview at the Paris AI Action Summit Tuesday. “I think he’s probably just trying to slow us down.”
Previously, Musk cosigned an open letter demanding that the AI industry as a whole enact a six-month hiatus in developing models more complex than GPT-4 before launching his xAI company almost exactly six months later. More recently, Musk disparaged OpenAI’s $500 billion Stargate Project, claiming that the consortium backing the plan did not have the funds to do so. When asked about those comments in the interview, Altman said “I’m not the one who tweeted funding secured. I just actually try to show up and build,” referencing Musk’s infamous Tesla tweet.
OpenAI currently operates as a nonprofit organization that controls the subsidiary OpenAI LP for-profit company. The for-profit LP company is what helped OpenAI develop from a bare-bones research startup to an industry leader valued at around $100 billion. The company now intends to flip that hierarchy on its head with the for-profit entity controlling the non-profit arm as a subsidiary, a matter over which Elon Musk is currently suing.
“It’s time for OpenAI to return to the open-source, safety-focused force for good it once was,” Musk’s attorney, Marc Toberoff, told CNBC. As part of the offer, Musk’s own generative AI company, xAI, would merge with OpenAI (with, presumably, Musk at the helm instead of Altman).
“I wish he would just compete by building a better product, but I think there’s been a lot of tactics,” Altman said in the Bloomberg interview. “Many, many lawsuits, all sorts of other crazy stuff, now this. And we’ll try to just put our head down and keep working.”
When asked whether Musk’s strategy against OpenAI comes from “a position of insecurity,” Altman took a moment to savage his business rival.
“Probably his whole life is from a position of insecurity. I feel for the guy,” he said. “I don’t think he’s, like, a happy person. I do feel for him.”
Mozilla is giving Firefox’s Smart Window two new tricks. If you haven’t tried it yet, Smart Window is an optional AI mode in Firefox with a built-in chat that helps you get things done while you browse. With this update, it can fill out online forms using details from your tabs and keep an eye on websites for you.
Tired of typing the same details into every form?
The absolutely absurd idea of putting a touchscreen display on a mouse isn't exactly new. Turtle Beach already did it with its Command Series MC7, which features a 2.25-inch control screen. But apparently, even that wasn't ridiculous enough for Arctic Fox Technologies. Its new Super Mouse looks like someone took the chunky old Atari ST mouse, slapped a touchscreen and scroll wheel on it, and called it an upgrade.
The result is a rather unusual-looking mouse that is now on Kickstarter, starting at $199. And as ridiculous as it looks, some of its features are genuinely intriguing.
Apple is less than a day away from launching its highly anticipated OLED MacBook Pro with a touch-sensitive screen. But it appears that the upgrade is going to cost a pretty penny. According to a report by Bloomberg, Apple is reportedly eyeing a starting price of $2,899 for the 14-inch MacBook Pro, while the 16-inch version could start at $3,399 in the US.
"At $2,899, the 14-inch model would mark the highest starting price for a new MacBook Pro model, surpassing the $2,799 Apple charged for a 17-inch version introduced in 2006," says the report. The report claims that Apple is targeting a minimum price hike of $400 for its upcoming redesigned 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models.