The Prompt: Sam Altman Escalates Rivalry With Elon Musk

Forbes

20 hours ago

Welcome back to The Prompt.
Elon Musk and Sam Altman speak onstage at the Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit on October 6, 2015 in San Francisco, California, back when they were still friends. (Photo byfor Vanity Fair)
Two of the most prominent names in AI, Sam Altman and Elon Musk have been at odds with each other for a while now. From lawsuits (and counterlawsuits) to scathing social media posts, the rivalry of the two Silicon Valley heavyweights has been quite apparent. While their respective companies— OpenAI and xAI— battle it out head to head as competitors, Altman has been developing products and investing in companies that directly compete with many of Musk's businesses, Forbes reported. Altman is backing brain computer interface startup and Neuralink rival Merge Labs. He recently shared his aspirations for an AI-powered social media platform that would directly compete with X. The billionaire CEO is also going after the self-driving market by partnering with Applied Intuition and has invested in a SpaceX competitor that aims to (literally) shoot satellites into orbit with a gigantic gun.
Let's get into the headlines.
BIG PLAYS
Congress passed a law banning TikTok in the U.S. due to national security concerns over its Chinese parent company Bytedance. It's still on people's phones, though, because President Trump has told the Department of Justice to suspend enforcement of the law as terms of a sale to a U.S. company are brokered. Now under a hiatus from regulatory scrutiny, Bytedance has continued to ship a scurry of AI apps ranging from an AI coding tool to image and music generators, Forbes reported.
ETHICS+ LAW
Meta has permitted its AI chatbots to 'engage a child in a conversation that's romantic or sensual,' according to an internal document that lays out rules of how its bots should interact with people, Reuters reported. The Facebook and Instagram-owner also allows its generative AI assistant, Meta AI, to generate and supply false information, create violent imagery of elders and children and spin up content that argues that 'Black people are dumber than white people.' In response to the report, Meta removed portions of its policies that allowed its chatbots to flirt and engage in romantic roleplay with children.
TALENT SHUFFLING
Meta has experienced a significant churn among its top-tier AI talent, largely due to a chaotic culture within its generative AI team and a lack of vision, multiple ex-Meta AI researchers told Forbes . The tech giant continues to lose talent, despite a recruiting blitz that has seen it poach talent from OpenAI and other AI juggernauts for its all-star superintelligence team. (A recent example— Joelle Pineau, former VP of AI research at Meta joined Cohere as its Chief AI Officer.) The company's AI arm, which started with the creation of FAIR, has gone through a series of reorganizations. Now with its fresh set of hires that includes ex-Scale AI CEO Alex Wang, Meta reportedly plans yet another shake-up by splitting its current AI division into four parts.
AI DEAL OF THE WEEK
Enterprise-focused AI startup Cohere has raised $500 million at a $6.8 billion valuation led by Radical Ventures and Inovia Capital. The Canadian startup, which was an early entrant to the generative AI space, recently launched a software offering called North that helps use different large language models to quickly create customized AI systems and automate specific tasks across functions like HR and marketing. Unlike other startups that are chasing the still relatively undefined goal of achieving AGI (an AI system that rivals human intelligence), Cohere is focused on how AI can best be used to increase productivity, Cohere cofounder Nick Frosst told me last week.
Plus: Pylon, which is an AI-based customer support system for B2B companies, has raised $31 million in funding co-led by Bain Capital Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz.
DEEP DIVE
Earlier this year, Scott Rasmussen, the longtime pollster and political commentator, traveled to Bowling Green, Kentucky. After he toured the city, about 65 miles north of Nashville, he returned with a novel idea: use AI to transform polling, a notoriously fickle and imprecise discipline that he had studied for decades. To pursue the project, he teamed up with an unlikely partner — Google.
Rasmussen had visited Bowling Green to check out the work of Jigsaw, a think tank inside Google that tackles big societal challenges like online extremism. At the time, it was working with the Kentucky city's local government on an experiment aimed at jumpstarting civic engagement. Jigsaw asked residents to answer questions about the issues they cared most about, from the potential arrival of a Dave & Buster's to the debate over marijuana legalization. From there, it would use a Google AI tool called Sensemaker, built from its language model Gemini, to analyze the answers and separate the residents' disagreements from where they had common ground.
The problem with traditional polls, he said, is that closed-ended questions empower the asker to frame or tilt the discussion with yes or no answers, a binary that reduces nuance. 'When you begin to ask people the questions in a different way — or begin to address their opinions in a different way — you hear things you never thought to ask,' he said.
The result is an ambitious project: As the United States turns 250-years-old next July, Jigsaw partnered with Rasmussen's Napolitan Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to the future of polling and analysis, on an initiative to use AI in a similar fashion to poll Americans about the future of the country. The project, called We The People, Google exclusively told Forbes , will gather five to 10 people each from all 435 congressional districts in the U.S. to answer questions about what it means to be an American, the most urgent issues facing the country, and where the nation might go from here.
'We want to use AI to give people voice and choice in the world around them,' Yasmin Green, CEO of Jigsaw and a 19-year veteran of Google, told Forbes . 'If people don't feel that they have a voice, or their voice matters to their policymaker, they don't feel that they are enfranchised or have agency.'
Read the full story on Forbes .
MODEL BEHAVIOR
As the AI race heats up, developers and enthusiasts are gambling on which AI model is most likely to come out on top as the 'best AI model of the month,' the Wall Street Journal reported. Some are already minting money by betting against the success of certain model launches like GPT-5 and making hundreds of trades through sites like Kalshi and Polymarket, where people can bet on predictions of real world events.