OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang have publicly maintained that the partnership between the two companies remains strong and stable, even as multiple reports suggest the relationship may be facing underlying strains.
Recently, some reports claimed that all is not well between the two AI giants. According to one such news report, OpenAI is reportedly unsatisfied with some of Nvidia’s latest artificial intelligence (AI) chips and has been exploring alternative suppliers since last year.
However, in a clarification post, Sam Altman dismissed these claims, denying that OpenAI is unhappy with Nvidia’s products.
“We love working with NVIDIA, and they make the best AI chips in the world. We hope to be a gigantic customer for a very long time,” Altman wrote in a post on X (formerly Twitter) Tuesday. “I don’t get where all this insanity is coming from,” the executive added.
Nvidia CEO vows to invest in OpenAI, but…
Adding weight to Altman's assurance, Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang said just a few days ago that the US tech giant will make a “huge” investment in OpenAI, while dismissing reports suggesting he is unhappy with the generative AI company, news agency AFP reported.
Huang made the remarks late on Saturday in Taipei after another report claimed that Nvidia's plan to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI had been put on hold as both sides were rethinking the partnership.
“We are going to make a huge investment in OpenAI. I believe in OpenAI. We will invest the largest investment we've ever made,” he said.
While this assurance seemed to settle the matter, Jensen Huang was quoted in another video as saying that Nvidia had never stated it would invest $100 billion in OpenAI in a single round, after a reporter asked whether the investment plan was still on the table.
“There was never a commitment. They invited us to invest up to $100B. We will invest one step at a time…We are honoured that they invited us, and we will consider each round at a time,” he was quoted as saying.
In September, Nvidia said it plans to invest as much as $100 billion into OpenAI as part of a deal that gave the chipmaker a stake in the startup and gave OpenAI the cash it needed to buy the advanced chips, Reuters reported.
What do the rumours say?
According to Reuters, OpenAI's reported dissatisfaction with Nvidia is linked to the chipmaker's growing focus on specialised chips for specific AI inference tasks, the process by which an AI model, such as the one that powers the ChatGPT app, responds to customer queries and requests.
Nvidia dominates in training large AI models. But a new battle is emerging around inference — the chips used to run these models in real-world applications. This decision by OpenAI and other companies to seek out alternatives in the inference chip market marks a significant test of Nvidia’s AI dominance, the agency report said.