OpenAI Cut Off From Elon Musk’s Twitter Data Access Amid Previous Tensions

Twitter CEO Elon Musk was behind the decision to cut off OpenAI’s access to the social media platform’s data, The New York Times revealed last Thursday.

In December 2022, Musk criticized OpenAI’s ChatGPT as being too “woke” and said that the artificial intelligence tool was capable of lying. Just weeks after it launched ChatGPT, OpenAI had its access to Twitter’s data shut down because Musk reportedly felt that the $2 million that OpenAI paid per year to license Twitter’s data was insufficient.

OpenAI had been licensing Twitter’s data to help build its AI chatbot, according to the Times. 

Musk had been in contact with a Canadian professor from the University of Toronto that he formed called X.AI.

Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015 but left the company in 2018. He reportedly wanted to run OpenAI alone, but fellow co-founder Sam Altman and others turned down his proposal.

Earlier this month, the billionaire entrepreneur signed a letter calling for a six-month halt on artificial intelligence research and development. He had previously criticized OpenAI for the way it had been producing responses to queries, after a user had retweeted a screenshot of ChatGPT’s reply to a question about a hypothetical scenario involving racial slurs. 

Currently, the Twitter CEO is working on launching his own OpenAI rival. 

“I’m going to start something which I call ‘TruthGPT,’ or a maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe,” Musk said during an interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson. 

Musk has assembled a team of AI researchers and engineers and secured thousands of high-powered GPU processors from Nvidia Corp.

In the last month, Musk previously threatened to sue Microsoft over the mining of the company data that is used to train its AI model. Twitter and Microsoft had ended their relationship in technical support.

Other big tech companies are working on other forms of AI models similar to ChatGPT where data owners are putting a stop to them or charging them for the use of their content.

ChatGPT had received criticism from artists, academia, educators, journalists, and public advocates. Some have feared that AI would be millions out of work due to the capabilities of the technology.

Musk had previously called for the regulation of AI putting the technology on check as a possible.

““AI has great power to do good and evil,” Musk said about the use of the technology. “That which affects safety of the public has, over time, become regulated to ensure that companies do not cut corners.”

Altman and Musk previously had friction of vision as Altman had criticized him and calling him a “jerk”.

“To say a positive thing about Elon, I think he really does care about a good future with AGI,” Altman said on Kara Swisher’s podcast.

Produced in association with Benzinga