OpenAI executives were on a tear this week trying to quell critics

Ahead of the Super Bowl on Sunday, OpenAI has been busy playing defense. 

CEO Sam Altman and a wave of senior executives at the artificial intelligence startup took to social media this week to try and dispel concerns about the company’s partnerships, litigation, research operations and swipes from its biggest rival, Anthropic.

In a podcast appearance on Thursday, Altman said he often feels like there is a “crazy hurricane” turning around the company, and sometimes his leadership team has to try and “correct” narratives.

“It is a strange way to live,” Altman said. “I don’t know of any private company that has ever been so in the news and so under a microscope, and at some level, it’s frustrating.”

OpenAI has become one of the fastest-growing commercial entities on the planet since the launch of its chatbot ChatGPT in 2022. But the company has been under intense scrutiny since it inked more than $1.4 trillion worth of infrastructure deals last year, including a $100 billion partnership with Nvidia that rocked the tech sector. 

Questions about the state of that partnership began swirling a week ago after the Wall Street Journal reported that the deal is “on ice.”

An OpenAI spokesperson told the Journal that the company is “actively working through details” of the partnership.

But speculation about a potential rift continued on Monday after Reuters reported that OpenAI is “unsatisfied” with some of Nvidia’s chips. A spokesperson told CNBC that Nvidia “powers the vast majority of OpenAI’s inference fleet and delivers the best performance per dollar for inference.”

The reports prompted Altman to weigh in directly.

“We love working with NVIDIA and they make the best AI chips in the world. We hope to be a gigantic customer for a very long time,” Altman wrote in a post on X on Monday. “I don’t get where all this insanity is coming from.”

Sachin Katti, the former Intel CTO who joined OpenAI in November to help build out its infrastructure, also shared a statement. He called OpenAI’s work with Nvidia “foundational” in a post on X on Monday. 

“NVIDIA is our most important partner for both training and inference, and our entire compute fleet runs on NVIDIA GPUs,” Katti wrote. “This is not a vendor relationship. It is deep, ongoing co-design.”  

CNBC has reached out to OpenAI for additional comment.

By Tuesday, Altman had turned his attention to a different battle: OpenAI’s ongoing litigation with Elon Musk. 

Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015, departed the company in 2018 and went on to start a competitor called xAI in 2023. He sued OpenAI and Altman for alleged breach of contract and financial damages the following year. 

OpenAI has dismissed Musk’s efforts as part of a “campaign of harassment,” and the case is expected to head to trial in April.

“Really excited to get Elon under oath in a few months, Christmas in April!” Altman wrote in a post on X on Tuesday.

Musk’s xAI filed a separate lawsuit against OpenAI and Apple last year, alleging the two companies had engaged in an “anticompetitive scheme” to thwart rivals. 

Jason Kwon, OpenAI’s chief strategy officer, called the lawsuit “frivolous” and shared several screenshots of new court filings in a post on X on Tuesday. The screenshots said that the only documents xAI has produced are “a handful of corporate policies,” and that the company has “a widespread practice of using disappearing messaging tools like Signal and XChat.”

“New court filings show how Elon was engaging in some maximum truth deleting,” Kwon wrote. “Makes you wonder what he is hiding.”

That same day, Mark Chen, OpenAI’s chief research officer, shared a post pushing back on the idea that the startup is favoring an “increasingly product-focused agenda” over research.

OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit research lab in 2015, but the company has released several consumer and enterprise products following the successful launch of ChatGPT. In December, OpenAI declared a “code red” and sidelined several projects to focus on improving its chatbot, and the company has seen a number of senior researchers depart in recent months.   

Jerry Tworek, who served as OpenAI’s vice president of research, announced his decision to leave the company in January. Tworek said he wanted to “explore types of research that are hard to do at OpenAI,” according to a post on X. 

Chen said the majority of OpenAI’s compute is still allocated to foundational research, not to product milestones. He said he and Jakub Pachocki, OpenAI’s chief scientist, are “the last people in the world who would push for the advancement of products over the advancement of research.”

“Foundational research has been core to OpenAI from the start, and today we run a research program with hundreds of exploratory projects – much like the ones that led to our reasoning-model breakthrough,” Chen wrote on Tuesday. 

By Wednesday, OpenAI executives were occupied with an entirely new problem. 

The company’s rival Anthropic unveiled its first Super Bowl campaign, taking a not-so-subtle swipe at OpenAI’s recent decision to begin testing ads within ChatGPT.

OpenAI announced last month that free users and ChatGPT Go subscribers in the U.S. will start to see ads. The ads will be clearly labeled, appear at the bottom of the chatbot’s answers and will not influence ChatGPT’s responses, the company said.

Anthropic is taking a different approach, and announced Wednesday that it plans to keep its chatbot Claude ad-free. Its Super Bowl campaign centers around that decision, and it will air a 60-second pregame ad and a 30-second in-game ad that both feature the tag line, “Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude.”

Altman and Kate Rouch, OpenAI’s chief marketing officer, were not pleased. 

In a post on X, Altman said that the commercials are “funny” but “clearly dishonest,” and that OpenAI would “obviously never run ads in the way Anthropic depicts them.”

“We are not stupid and we know our users would reject that,” Altman wrote. “I guess it’s on brand for Anthropic doublespeak to use a deceptive ad to critique theoretical deceptive ads that aren’t real, but a Super Bowl ad is not where I would expect it.”

Rouch shared a separate post on X criticizing Anthropic’s campaign. 

“Real betrayal isn’t ads. It’s control,” Rouch said. “Anthropic thinks powerful AI should be tightly controlled in small rooms in San Francisco and Davos. That its [sic] too DANGEROUS for you… We don’t believe that.”

Both Altman and Rouch noted that OpenAI has more free users than Anthropic does, and Altman said that means OpenAI has “a differently-shaped problem than they do.” 

Altman later brushed off the spat during his podcast appearance on Thursday, calling it a “side show.”

“People are excited for a food fight,” he said.

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