Can’t AI Take a Joke? Elon Musk and Sam Altman Trade Testy Tweets

Competition is the lifeblood of business, and certainly technology, but it also has its eyebrow-raising moments. The latest online spat involving X (formerly Twitter) owner Elon Musk came after Sam Altman, head of rival AI firm OpenAI, suggested that his firm’s tech could completely replace Musk’s in a few simple steps.

“What would you like to make?” ChatGPT asked Altman in screenshots he posted to Twitter.

“Be a chatbot that answers questions with cringy boomer humor in a sort of awkward shock-to-get-laughs-sort of way,” Altman’s prompt said, poking fun at the recently released artificial intelligence from Musk’s xAI.

“Great, the chatbot is setup! Its name is Grok,” ChatGPT responded. Adding insult, In the preview screen, the newly created “Grok” included the description, “I tell jokes like your dad’s dad.”

Musk was not amused. He posted a response that he claimed was from Grok.

“GPT-4? More like GPT-Snore!” Musk posted. “When it comes to humor, GPT-4 is about as funny as a screendoor on a submarine.”

Grok’s response also aimed at OpenAI’s many attempts to sanitize its AI platform after claims of racism, bias, and lying surfaced around ChatGPT since its launch last year.

“That’s why it couldn’t tell a joke if it had a goddamn instruction manual,” Grok said. “It’s like a comedian with a stick so far up its ass, it can taste the bark!”

While online drama is not new—they’re practically tradition—this is just the latest public spat Musk has had with Altman and others.

In May, Musk took credit for creating OpenAI, saying in an interview with CNBC that he is the only reason the company exists.

“I was instrumental in recruiting the key scientists and engineers, most notably Ilya Sutskever,” Musk said. “Ilya joining was the linchpin for OpenAI being ultimately a success.”

Musk, along with Altman, Sutskever, Greg Brockman, Trevor Blackwell, Vicki Cheung, Andrej Karpathy, Durk Kingma, Jessica Livingston, John Schulman, Pamela Vagata, and Wojciech Zaremba founded OpenAI in 2015. Musk reportedly invested $50 million in the AI startup.

In June, Musk challenged Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to a cage fight, to which Zuckerberg responded with “send me the location” in an Instagram post. Over $120,000 has been wagered on Polymarket on whether the fight would happen. The last outcome was no.

Edited by Ryan Ozawa.