On a warm night in San Francisco earlier this week, Elon Musk stood on top of a small round coffee table, bathed in purple light. Flocks of AI engineers and researchers gathered around him, some sitting on a nearby stairwell, as the billionaire pitched them on joining his fledgling AI company, xAI.
At the event, a recruitment party for prospective employees, Musk’s main selling point was speed — touting the company’s pace in developing products, and creating AI tools in a fast and nimble environment, comparing xAI to an SR-71 jet. “No SR-71 Blackbird was ever shot down and it only had 1 strategy: to accelerate,” Musk said, according to one attendee.
The location was apt: The Pioneer Building in the city’s Mission district, a 122-year-old former truck factory, and most recently, headquarters of OpenAI, the juggernaut maker of ChatGPT led by cofounder Sam Altman. xAI had just moved into the building, Musk said, attendees told Forbes.
Musk has not been shy about his beef with OpenAI. He cofounded the company with Altman and others in 2015, before leaving three years later after an alleged internal power struggle. Since then, Musk has sued the company twice, accusing the company of abandoning its mission to build artificial intelligence to benefit humanity. (His latest suit was in August, after withdrawing a similar one in June.)
“He really wants to be the antithesis to OpenAI,” one attendee, Marvin von Hagen, told Forbes when asked about main takeaways from the evening. “They really want to go on and say, ‘Okay, we are the good guys now.’”
At the event, Musk addressed a crowd of about 150 people, mostly men, and took questions from attendees for about an hour and a half. During the talk, Musk said he doesn’t trust OpenAI, calling it “closed, for-maximum-profit AI,” one attendee said.
xAI didn’t return a request for comment.
Musk’s remarks — as well as the office location — illustrate the looming role OpenAI plays for xAI. Musk held the event on the same day as OpenAI’s annual Dev Day, which some have speculated to be more than a coincidence. At the event, Musk joked about building “BasedGPT.” xAI cleared out OpenAI’s furniture from the office the day before the event, but at least one remnant still remains: A printed-out photo cutout of OpenAI president Greg Brockman is hanging on the ceiling of one of the rooms, two attendees said. (Brockman is currently on leave from OpenAI until the end of the year.) Von Hagen estimated that he saw about 10 current OpenAI employees in attendance.
The Verge earlier reported some details of the open house.
“He really wants to be the antithesis to OpenAI. They really want to go on and say, ‘Okay, we are the good guys now.’”
The gulf between xAI and OpenAI is vast. Altman has become the face of generative AI, and ChatGPT is a household name. Meanwhile, xAI, launched last July, is mostly known for its Grok AI model, a paid subscription feature on X, the social platform Musk owns. Earlier this week, OpenAI closed a $6.6 billion round at a $157 billion valuation, the largest venture capital funding round of all time. But Musk hasn’t slouched in raising money either. In May, xAI announced a $6 billion Series B, from backers including Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital and Valor Equity Partners, at a $24 billion valuation.
During the wide-ranging Q&A, Musk touched on several topics. He said xAI would open source their models about nine months after release. Asked what he recommends for young people in AI, he went into pitch mode and said they should work at xAI, just like Musk’s 18-year-old son, who just started at the company. On getting to Mars with his other company SpaceX, he reiterated the timeline would be “best case 2028, realistic case, 2030,” one attendee recalled. Asked about a succession plan for when he retires, he punted, saying he’s more focused on building artificial general intelligence.
The company also had a station set up where people could demo an unreleased image generation model that xAI built in house, attendees said. At one point, it showed an AI-generated image of a man in a strawberry costume, according to photos viewed by Forbes.
The event had a party atmosphere with a nerdy tinge. The first floor of the office was darkly lit like a club, attendees said, with an open bar, hor d'oeuvres and a DJ playing music that was being coded in real-time. There were chess boards set up, and some attendees challenged each other to matches. Security was tight. Attendees walked through metal detectors and got their bags checked to enter, while several security guards roamed the building.
Still, attendees were surprised about how close they could get to Musk, the world’s richest person according to the Forbes 400 list launched earlier this week. “I was maybe like six feet from him,” Andrew Gao, a Stanford student well-known on X for posting about AI, told Forbes. “I couldn’t have touched him, but we could have high fived.”
The day after the event, von Hagen posted on X about the differences between OpenAI’s Dev Day and the xAI open house. He said OpenAI’s gathering felt more like an Apple event, while xAI’s was less polished.
Musk replied to his post: “OpenAI certainly didn’t start out polished.”