The billionaires are fighting about AI again

Most online arguments are pretty easy to ignore, but sometimes the arguments are about how to spend billions of dollars on a world-changing technology.

What happened: Elon Musk said Grok, the chatbot from his startup xAI, would be made open source this week. This comes after he sued his former colleagues at OpenAI, accusing them of abandoning their mission of creating AI to better humanity — by instead creating a closed model to generate profits for Microsoft.

• OpenAI fired back by producing emails where Musk agreed that the company’s tech should be closed and the need to pursue a for-profit entity, even proposing an acquisition by Tesla.

Catch-up: Open-source software is intended to be redistributed, along with its code, which can be built on and modified. When it comes to AI, there are a few arguments for and against this:

• Some companies worry their systems would be used in dangerous ways, like creating misinformation campaigns or generating instructions on how to build weapons.
   
• Proponents (some of whom are accelerationists, who tend to downplay risks of new tech) say it provides more transparency and oversight, and helps spur innovation.

Why it matters: It’s easy — and probably correct — to dismiss this as Musk trying to be a provocateur, but it has drawn other big figures back into a debate that, despite getting hyperbolic, is shaping what could be a trillion-dollar industry: whether or not AI should be open source.

• On X, Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures started by calling Musk’s lawsuit a distraction, which spun out to saying that open-source AI could be a national security and economic risk, comparing it to the Manhattan Project.
   
• Andreessen Horowitz’s Marc Andreessen accused Khosla of trying to “ban open source” as part of a “ginned-up moral panic.”

Bottom line: Moral arguments aside, VCs have money at stake: Khosla Ventures was an early OpenAI backer, while Andreessen Horowitz invested in open-source competitor Mistral. And the platform with the most financial support will have the most influence over the path forward.