Elon Musk, together with a group of investors, has made an unsolicited bid to buy acquire the assets of OpenAI for $97,4-billion.
OpenAI was formed as a non-profit organisation by Musk, chief executive Sam Altman and others in 2015, with the aim of making its technology freely available. When the founders split three years later, Altman made it a for-profit company to enable it to raise funds.
The move is the latest in an ongoing face-off between Musk and Altman, and has so far been rejected by Altman in a post on X.
The consortium making the bid is made up of Musk’s AI company Xai, Vy Capital, broker Ari Emanual and a number of other investors who are so far unknown.
OpenAI is currently in a new, $40-billion, funding deal with SoftBank that would value the company at $300-billion.
At the end of January OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle and MGX announced the Stargate initiative to invest $500-billion over the next four years in AI infrastructure.