‘I won’t even start on Grok’: Altman hits back at Elon Musk as AI feud escalates

To this, Altman defended ChatGPT, saying that “almost a billion people use it and some of them may be in very fragile mental states.”

“It is genuinely hard; we need to protect vulnerable users, while also making sure our guardrails still allow all of our users to benefit from our tools,” he added.

The OpenAI CEO then turned to Tesla’s Autopilot feature, claiming “more than 50 people have died from crashes related to Autopilot. I only ever rode in a car using it once, some time ago, but my first thought was that it was far from a safe thing for Tesla to have released. I won’t even start on some of the Grok decisions.”

“You take ‘every accusation is a confession’ so far,” Altman added.

Both xAI’s Grok and OpenAI’s ChatGPT AI chatbots have been under fire in the last few months. Grok has been in the spotlight for nonconsensually generating sexually explicit images and was recently sued by Ashley St. Clair, one of Elon Musk’s sons’ mother, for digitally altering images of her during her teenage years and adulthood.

On the other hand, ChatGPT has been sued in a murder-suicide case where an ex-Yahoo techie named Erik-Soelberg died by suicide after killing his 83-year-old mother in her own home.

The latest feud between the two tech giants comes in the middle of a long-running legal battle over OpenAI’s status as a non-profit company. Musk has demanded that the ChatGPT maker, along with Microsoft, pay him $130 million for punitive damages and other penalties for the “wrongful gains” that they received from the billionaire during OpenAI’s initial days.