La war between Sam altman ed Elon Musk continues. OpenAI, the parent company of ChatGPT, is working on an ambitious and potentially explosive project: a X-style social network (formerly Twitter), a move that would hit Musk right in the heart of his empire. According to sources cited by The Verge e Reuters, the idea would still be in experimental phase but there is already one internal prototype, focused on image generation with ChatGPT, featuring a social feed.
Altman is reportedly gathering private feedback from developers and outside experts to assess how to proceed. It is not yet clear whether the project will result in a standalone app or if it will be integrated directly into ChatGPT.
The goal? To offer a platform where artificial intelligence not only enhances content, but also becomes sharing engine, suggesting posts, generating viral images and enhancing users' creativity.
From AI to social media, it's a cold war in pixels and algorithms
OpenAI's social project is not born in a vacuum. Rather, it is rooted in a increasingly heated feud between Sam Altman and Elon Musk, co-founder of OpenAI and now owner of X. Their once collaborative relationship has evolved into a high-voltage clash fueled by divergent visions and mutual provocations.
Last February, Musk attempted a lightning takeover: an unsolicited offer from $97,4 billion to buy OpenAIAltman's response? Lapidary and ironic: "No thanks, but we can buy Twitter for 9,74 billion, if you want." But it wasn't the only one a dig between the two. Musk had previously sued OpenAI, accusing it of “betraying the original non-profit mission” to chase profit. OpenAI responded with a counter-complaint, accusing Musk of legal harassment and deliberate attempts to sabotage its transformation into a for-profit company. The lawsuit is set to go to trial in the spring of 2026.
Meta, the other contender: the feed war is open
It's not just a challenge with Musk. Also Mark Zuckerberg and Meta are on a collision course with Altman. Meta is in fact developing astandalone app for its own AI assistant, which will include a similar social function. The news did not go unnoticed: “OK, so maybe we’ll make a social app,” Altman wrote on X, with the tone of someone who accepts a challenge, not suffers it.
Meta and X have a non-negligible competitive advantage: a vast user data volume in real time, which they use to train their respective models (LLaMA for Meta, Grok for X). OpenAI, on the other hand, has so far had to do reliance on less directly collected data. A social network of its own, then, could solve this strategic disadvantage, providing OpenAI with continuous and dynamic streams of data to improve its models.
Augmented Creativity: AI and Viral Meet
Behind OpenAI's social network is a radical idea: AI can help users produce better, more viral content. Grok’s integration into X has already shown how powerful an AI can be when it comes to generating “stupid but viral” tweets — and many industry observers admit to being jealous of the success of Musk’s approach.
OpenAI's prototype aims to do just that: exploit ChatGPT's image generation capabilities to stimulate users' creativity, helping them create memes, infographics, logos, cartoon-style profiles (like the one recently used by Altman on X), or even professional content.
There is however a technical problem still to be solved: Demand has already overloaded the company's servers. "Our GPUs are melting," Altman wrote in late March, announcing temporary limitations on the use of the image generation feature, pending optimizations.
OpenAI Doesn't Stop: New Models, Reduced Costs, and Enhanced Performance
Meanwhile, OpenAI keep updating its core technology. Just a few days ago it launched the new family of models GPT-4.1, in mini and nano variants. Models that outperform even GPT-4o, especially in writing code, understanding long contexts and in the ability to follow instructions. These new models are cheaper to use, and will replace GPT-4.5 in the API starting in July.
OpenAI is no longer content to be the cutting-edge laboratory of artificial intelligence: it aims to become an absolute protagonist of the global digital ecosystem. With a valuation that makes it the second most valuable private company in the world, is expanding its scope well beyond the confines of research, the next battleground will also be fought with likes, feeds and memes.
