Welcome to 9to5Neural. AI moves fast. We help you keep up. Last week everyone drank a big glass of DeepSeek with a side of R1. Refreshing as that was, the world of AI has started to calm — WAIT, WHAT?! Elon Musk is trying to buy OpenAI? Here we go again…
WSJ: Elon Musk-led group makes $97.4 billion bid for control of OpenAI
Jessica Toonkel and Berber Jin exclusively report for The Wall Street Journal that “a consortium of investors led by Elon Musk is offering $97.4 billion to buy the nonprofit that controls OpenAI,” the company behind ChatGPT.
Musk’s attorney, Marc Toberoff, said he submitted the bid to OpenAI’s board of directors Monday.
The unsolicited offer adds a major complication to Altman’s carefully laid plans for OpenAI’s future, including converting it to a for-profit company and spending up to $500 billion on AI infrastructure through a joint venture called Stargate. He and Musk are already fighting in court over the direction of OpenAI.
“It’s time for OpenAI to return to the open-source, safety-focused force for good it once was,” Musk said in a statement provided by Toberoff. “We will make sure that happens.”
The unsolicited bid comes as OpenAI shifts from a nonprofit to a for-profit firm led by Sam Altman. Musk originally helped fund OpenAI but left after being denied control of the company.
Then OpenAI took the world by storm when it made the ChatGPT-3 chatbot public, introducing the world to large language models and a new era of generative AI.
More recently, Musk has sued OpenAI and called the company ClosedAI. He also started xAI, a competing artificial intelligence firm, which integrates with and learns from X (formerly Twitter).
Speaking of X (formerly Twitter), OpenAI’s Altman responded to the news with a post (formerly tweet) that says no thanks, but OpenAI is (surely jokingly) willing to buy Twitter for 10% of Elon’s takeover bid of OpenAI. Twitter, of course, is the original name for Musk’s X platform.
As noted X user @greg16676935420 said in a profound response to Altman’s post, “sharts fired.”
In other news, ChatGPT released its o3-mini “cost-effective reasoning” model and is finalizing the design for its first custom chip.
Google released Gemini 2.0 Flash to show off its latest in reasoning models, Perplexity gave Gemini 2.0 Flash to Pro subscribers, and Microsoft gave OpenAI’s o1 reasoning model to Copilot customers for free.
Meanwhile, ChatGPT pulled ahead of DeepSeek in App Store rankings, ChatGPT usage is at an all-time high and climbing, and the ChatGPT app had a design change that some have criticized. OpenAI also borrowed from DeepSeek to sorta reveal the o3-mini “chain of thought” process, although it’s not nearly as transparent.
Otherwise, nothing major happened except OpenAI unveiling and releasing deep research for ChatGPT Pro users after the operator agent feature seemed to fall flat. While operator tries to do things for you in its own little OpenAI web browser, deep research automates extensive online searches and writes a report based on a given prompt.
Deep research is OpenAI’s next agent that can do work for you independently—you give it a prompt, and ChatGPT will find, analyze, and synthesize hundreds of online sources to create a comprehensive report at the level of a research analyst. Powered by a version of the upcoming OpenAI o3 model that’s optimized for web browsing and data analysis, it leverages reasoning to search, interpret, and analyze massive amounts of text, images, and PDFs on the internet, pivoting as needed in reaction to information it encounters.
The ability to synthesize knowledge is a prerequisite for creating new knowledge. For this reason, deep research marks a significant step toward our broader goal of developing AGI, which we have long envisioned as capable of producing novel scientific research.
All that does seem worth more than $97.4 billion, but Musk’s attorney says the wannabe takeover group is willing to outbid any competing offers for OpenAI control.
More on the latest in AI developments in the next edition of 9to5Neural — only on 9to5Mac! Read the previous issue here.
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