Who will shape the future of AI—Elon Musk or Sam Altman? In this exclusive CGTN Global Business segment, Dr. Amr Awadallah, CEO & Founder of Vectara, shares his insights on the power struggle over OpenAI and its implications for the broader AI landscape.
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Questions asked in this interview
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1:47What is this relationship between Elon Musk and Sam Altman, and how is their history really shaping the current state of AI competition?
3:00Influence the AI race and what impact do you think his companies have on global competition and regulation?
4:05How has its growth in popularity influenced other companies, their AI plans, and you know one thinks of the success of DeepSeek and China's success at an amazingly low expenditure compared to what's been going on in the United States?
Welcome to our special AI in focus segment. Apple announcing its biggest ever investment in the United States to the tune of $500 billion. The big focus of that investment will be on artificial intelligence. Apple planning to open a new factory for AI servers in Texas. The new Houston factory is meant to be in operations next year. Apple also said that it plans to hire about 20,000 new employees across the US. Most of those jobs will be in research and development with a large focus on AI. Now, Chinese tech giant Alibaba is also planning a big investment in artificial intelligence in China. It is putting more than $52 billion toward AI and cloud computing over the next three years. Alibaba's planned investment is more than the company has spent on AI over the past decade. Other Chinese firms have also been investing heavily in the sector. They include ByteDance, which plans to invest well over $20 billion on AI centered capital expenditures at some point this year. Now, this all this AI investment is happening as the race for dominance in the sector continues to heat up. At first, ChatGPT and Google's Gemini dominated the chatbot arena. But more recently, China's DeepSeek and now Elon Musk's Grok have also been making a splash. Okay, let's talk more about where AI is, where it's going, and the heavyweights that are dominating this field. And for that, we're joined by Amr Awadallah. He is the founder and CEO of the Generative AI company. There you see him waving. Vector Inc. Amr, always a pleasure. Good to see you.
I want to talk about the heavyweight clash right off the top. What is this relationship between Elon Musk and Sam Altman, and how is their history really shaping the current state of AI competition?
Well, to be honest, I don't think it's about the history. It's about the future. They're both fighting for the dominance of which chatbot will most of us depend on to get our information. So when Elon Musk went and acquired Twitter or X, that was him wanting to control the discourse. And he sees OpenAI in my opinion — this is a theory, I could be wrong — but he sees OpenAI with ChatGPT now at 400 million weekly active users, which is a massive number, as becoming the most dominant future way with which we're going to be getting our information, and he really wants to control that. I think that's what's going on here. But they've also had their little pointed exchanges back and forth in terms of trying to purchase each other's companies and saying, 'Hey, I'm the biggest guy on the block right now.' Yes, but I think it's with that goal. It's not out of vanity. It's not out of 'we broke up in the past.' It's all about controlling the future in my opinion.
Fair enough. There's a good reason for it. In other words, it's not just egos. Sure. Let's talk about Elon Musk given his new role in the US government. Influence the AI race and what impact do you think his companies have on global competition and regulation? And keep in mind as we talked about it was Sam Altman standing behind Trump when the president unveiled Stargate and Altman did play to Trump's ego saying this $100 billion AI infrastructure plan could not have happened without the president.
Yes, when the plan was already in place before the president. So yes, you are hinting at the right conclusion there. I think it's promising to see Trump balanced between them actually. So that's a good thing. Like we were worried that Trump would lean a lot more towards Elon Musk and giving Elon Musk what he's after. But clearly President Trump is being a lot more balanced and practical in how he is dealing with that. And he knows that having a competitive nature between multiple engines, OpenAI, Grok, Anthropic, DeepSeek now coming in from China which he was very positive on, only leads to better innovation and better technology.
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Awadallah, A. (2025, March 21). The Battle for OpenAI: Amr Awadallah on Musk vs. Altman | CGTN Interview [Interview transcript]. Vectara Inc. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1056897/
MLA
Amr Awadallah. "The Battle for OpenAI: Amr Awadallah on Musk vs. Altman | CGTN Interview." Vectara Inc, 21 Mar. 2025. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1056897/.
BibTeX
@misc{awadallah2025_1056897,
author = {Amr Awadallah},
title = {The Battle for OpenAI: Amr Awadallah on Musk vs. Altman | CGTN Interview},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, Vectara Inc. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2025},
month = {mar},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1056897/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
