OpenAI is quietly developing social network, report

CEO Sam Altman has been seeking feedback from select outsiders

OpenAI is building its own social network, marking a bold step into a space long dominated by giants like Meta and X.

While the project remains in its infancy, sources with knowledge of the project told The Verge that OpenAI has developed an internal prototype that blends social media with its powerful image generation tools.

At the heart of the early version is a feed-driven interface designed around content created with ChatGPT, particularly images.

Sources could not confirm whether the final product will emerge as a standalone app or a feature nested within ChatGPT itself, which just last month became the most downloaded app globally.

However, they said that CEO Sam Altman has been seeking feedback from select outsiders, indicating a high level of interest, and perhaps urgency, around the initiative.

Should OpenAI proceed further into the social media domain, it would likely intensify the already strained relationship between the company and Elon Musk.

In February, Musk made headlines with an unsolicited $97.4 billion offer to acquire OpenAI, a proposal Altman publicly rebuffed with a cheeky counter-offer: "No thank you but we will buy Twitter for $9.74 billion if you want."

That rivalry may only heat up if OpenAI goes live with its social platform. Musk's own AI product, Grok, is deeply integrated into X and leverages its massive trove of real-time data to generate results.

Meanwhile, Meta is also preparing to add a social feed to its forthcoming standalone app for its AI assistant, according to sources. That news reportedly spurred a quip from Altman on X: "ok fine maybe we'll do a social app."

According to insiders, OpenAI's social project is partly motivated by a desire for proprietary, real-time data, something both X and Meta have harnessed to train their AI models.

Meta's Llama benefits from its enormous user data sets, while Musk recently merged xAI with X, giving Grok unfettered access to X's content ecosystem.

It is too early to tell whether OpenAI's social network project will ever reach the public. With OpenAI's focus stretched across a growing suite of products, including ChatGPT, API services, partnerships with major enterprise clients, and rumoured new hardware, it's possible the social app may remain an experiment.

In February, OpenAI released GPT-4.5, its latest language model and the company's most expensive offering to date.

Rolled out as a "research preview," GPT-4.5 was not pitched as a radical leap forward, but rather as a major step upgrade over GPT-4, and one that CEO Sam Altman claimed was the first AI model capable of offering genuinely good advice.

"This is the first model that feels like talking to a thoughtful person to me," Altman posted on X.

"I have had several moments where I've sat back in my chair and been astonished at getting actually good advice from an AI."

Despite the praise, the launch didn't come without scepticism – especially over the model's steep cost.

"We really wanted to launch it to 'plus' and 'pro' [users] at the same time, but we've been growing a lot and are out of GPUs," Altman said.

He added that OpenAI expects to add "tens of thousands of GPUs" in the coming week, with "hundreds of thousands coming soon," as the company scrambles to meet rising demand.

"I'm pretty sure y'all will use every one we can rack up," Altman wrote.