'Rivalry' between Altman and Musk Intensifies... 'Underlying Reasons' Revealed
- The conflict between Altman and Musk is analyzed to stem from the competition in the US AI market over securing GPUs.
- The Stargate project led by Altman aims to secure high-performance GPUs with a $500 billion investment for AI industry development.
- Musk's xAI is rapidly growing in the AI market, posing a significant challenge to competitors.
- The article was summarized using an artificial intelligence-based language model.
- Due to the nature of the technology, key content in the text may be excluded or different from the facts.
Background of Altman-Musk Conflict: GPU Crisis
'War of Money' from Large-scale AI Data Centers
The rivalry between Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, and Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, in the US big tech industry is intensifying. The conflict revolves around the feasibility of the mega AI project 'Stargate,' actively supported by the US government. Analysts suggest that the background of the conflict between the two CEOs is the acquisition of high-performance graphics processing units (GPUs), essential for AI development.
Deterioration of Rivalry
According to industry sources on the 26th, CEO Altman posted on social media platform X (formerly Twitter) on the 23rd (local time), "If you make one more vile tweet, you'll be left alone." This was directed at CEO Musk. Previously, President Trump unveiled the joint venture Stargate, which aims to drive the development of the US AI industry, with CEO Altman, Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison, and SoftBank Chairman Masayoshi Son on the 21st. Stargate plans to secure a large number of high-performance GPUs and establish large-scale data centers with a $500 billion investment over four years.
In response, CEO Musk publicly poured cold water on X, saying, "They don't actually have that much money." Altman immediately countered, saying, "As you know, that's not true." Musk further criticized Altman for publicly supporting LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, who had previously opposed President Trump.
The background of the public verbal battle between the two CEOs is analyzed as competition in AI development. According to US tech media The Information on the 24th, CEO Altman pushed the Stargate project under the support of the Trump administration to secure high-performance GPUs. OpenAI has been releasing top-performing AI models by securing large-scale GPUs with Microsoft's investment and support.
However, last year, Microsoft could not provide the GPU volume that OpenAI demanded. It is known that there was an opinion within Microsoft that it would be difficult to secure additional customers to use the large-scale data centers. In this situation, CEO Altman decided to push the Stargate project, conceived with Microsoft a year ago, again with Oracle and SoftBank.
War for High-performance GPU Acquisition
Currently, the competition in global AI model development is fierce among OpenAI, Google, Meta, and Anthropic. These companies have been releasing new AI models one after another last year, raising the level of AI. OpenAI utilized the GPUs secured by Microsoft. Microsoft purchased 150,000 Nvidia GPU H100s in 2023 alone. The price of an H100 is about 50 million won each. Meta also purchased a similar scale. Google also bought tens of thousands of H100s and is using its own AI semiconductor TPU (Tensor Processing Unit). Anthropic mainly used data centers from its investor, Amazon.
In this situation, CEO Altman became more urgent. CEO Musk's AI company xAI, co-founded in 2023, started to rise rapidly. The AI chatbot 'Grok2,' released by xAI in August last year, quickly surpassed the performance of OpenAI's 'ChatGPT-4 Turbo' and Google's 'Gemini Pro 1.5,' which were the top AI services at the time. CEO Musk also announced last month that he would increase the size of the world's largest AI supercomputer 'Colossus,' used by xAI, by ten times. He plans to increase the H100 input scale from 100,000 to 1 million.
A representative of a domestic AI startup said, "The results of AI advancement are determined by the scale of GPUs used for learning," adding, "CEO Altman, a supporter of the Democratic Party, should not be concerned with political inclinations." CEO Altman tweeted in 2016, when President Trump was first elected, "The worst thing that happened in my life."
The level of AI infrastructure in Korea is poor. Yoo Young-sang, CEO of SK Telecom, pointed out at the 'SK AI Summit 2024' in November last year, "Even if you combine all of Korea, there are only 2,000 H100s." According to the Software Policy Research Institute, the total number of H100s owned by 1,441 major AI companies in Korea was only 1,961 as of the end of 2023. In a survey of AI companies by the Software Policy Research Institute, the percentage of respondents who said 'business operation is difficult due to lack of AI infrastructure (computing)' nearly doubled from 29.2% in 2020 to 53.2% in 2023.
Reporter Juwan Kim kjwan@hankyung.com

Korea Economic Daily

hankyung@bloomingbit.ioThe Korea Economic Daily Global is a digital media where latest news on Korean companies, industries, and financial markets.PiCK News
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