OpenAI Is Secretly Building a Social Network

Picture this: a social network populated mainly by AI bros. Sound like the place to hang?

We ask because OpenAI has been secretly building its own social media platform, which The Verge reports is intended to resemble X-formerly-Twitter — the social media middleweight owned by CEO Sam Altman's arch-nemesis, Elon Musk.

The project is still getting off the ground, but an internal prototype with a social media feed revolves around ChatGPT's new image generation capabilities, which you may be familiar with from the flood of Ghibli-styled AI images that dominated social media feeds last month. Altman has been privately asking outsiders for feedback about the project, according to the Verge.

If it goes ahead, it sounds reminiscent of how X directly integrates Musk's Grok AI model into the website, where it operates both as a standalone chatbot, while also being capable of responding directly to users' posts at their request.

This is an aspect that Grok-slash-X's competitors envy.

"The Grok integration with X has made everyone jealous," an employee working at a major AI lab told the Verge. "Especially how people create viral tweets by getting it to say something stupid."

Meta has also tried its hand at infusing AI into its own platforms, Facebook and Instagram, though perhaps with less success. Mainly, it's faced significant scrutiny for experimenting with entire AI-generated profiles, though it's also reportedly working on a standalone app for its AI chatbot, Meta AI. Altman responded to that news in February with a tweet saying, "maybe we'll do a social app" — and now it seems he wasn't messing around. 

If OpenAI can gain a substantial user base, it would give it an invaluable stream of real-time user data to tap into, an advantage that both X and Meta enjoy. ChatGPT is already the industry's most popular chatbot, and recently sealed its dominance by becoming the world's most downloaded app in March. Any extra data it can squeeze out of its own fans is just icing on the cake, especially as fresh training data is harder to come by these days. Competition remains fierce, and Musk, whose bitter rivalry with Altman and OpenAI stems back to the days when they were both involved in the then non-profit, has threatened to buy the company out from underneath Altman's control.

It's early days, though. We don't know OpenAI's social media stab will be released as part of the existing ChatGPT app, or be its own thing. We don't even know if OpenAI plans to see it through. In any case, it's a pretty big departure from anything OpenAI has attempted before.

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