Sam Altman takes a swipe at Elon Musk's Grok

Sam Altman and Elon Musk's long-running feud just took a very public and hilarious turn.

Rebuilding Grok with a single prompt

Last week, Musk announced xAI's new chatbot, Grok, positioning it as an irreverent, humorous ChatGPT rival powered by real-time posts from X. The launch conveniently arrived days before OpenAI's first developer conference.

On Thursday night, Altman hit back with a masterclass in trolling. He posted a screenshot showing off OpenAI's newly launched custom GPTs builder.

In the prompt, Altman instructed the builder to create a chatbot that answers questions with cringey boomer humor in an awkward shock-to-get-laughs sort of way. Without missing a beat, the GPT Builder replied that the bot was ready and suggested naming it Grok. Altman captioned the post: GPTs can save a lot of effort.

The dig taps into years of tension. Musk and Altman co-founded OpenAI as a non-profit in 2015 alongside Peter Thiel. But as Walter Isaacson documented in his Musk biography, Musk grew furious when OpenAI pivoted toward a commercial model and teamed up with Microsoft.

Why it matters

Altman's post wasn't just a brutal clapback; it was a clever live demonstration of OpenAI's new product. By reducing Musk's flagship AI personality to a two-sentence prompt, Altman signaled that custom personas are now trivial commodities that anyone can spin up in seconds.

Still, we think dismissing Grok as merely a cringey persona overlooks its real asset. Grok's primary advantage is its access to the real-time firehose of X posts, which no simple prompt inside ChatGPT can replicate. While Altman clearly won this round of internet theater, the long-term battle will likely be decided by proprietary data access rather than witty chatbot personalities.