Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg can’t seem to stay out of each other’s way right now. The two billionaires already are clashing in the social-media world and now their competition in artificial intelligence is set to heat up as both look to catch up with Microsoft and Google.
Musk has picked up the pace this week by officially announcing his xAI venture, to go alongside his ownership of
Tesla
(ticker: TSLA), SpaceX and Twitter. While details remain sparse for now, he previously has spoken of wanting to create an alternative to the AI platforms of
Microsoft
(MSFT) and
Alphabet’s
(GOOGL) Google.
Zuckerberg’s
Meta Platforms
(META) has talked about integrating chatbots across Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook, but has also taken a different tack to AI, by offering its own language model as open-source software to academics and researchers.
Now, it looks like Meta is ready to make a bigger assault on the AI market.
Meta will imminently release a commercial version of its AI model, which would be used by businesses to make their own software, the Financial Times reported on Thursday, citing people familiar with the plans. That would bring it into head-to-head competition with Microsoft and Google, although the report added that Meta doesn’t currently have plans to charge companies for using its model.
Meta declined to comment when contacted by Barron’s on Thursday. Meta shares were up 0.6% on Thursday.
It’s not clear yet how directly xAI and Meta will compete. Currently, xAI’s site said its purpose was to “understand the true nature of the universe”, with no mention so far of its commercial aims. On the other hand, it also noted it will work with Twitter and Tesla, as well as other companies.
That raises the prospect of xAI being trained on Musk’s Twitter, while Meta could feed in data from its own microblogging app Threads. It adds another tantalizing element in the Twitter-Threads clash. Whichever company wins over more users could then translate to more valuable proprietary data for training AI models, offering them something neither Google nor Microsoft has access to.
Write to Adam Clark at [email protected]
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