Tesla CEO Elon Musk has warned Microsoft chief Satya Nadella that OpenAI could end up “eating” his company alive, on the day the Sam Altman-led tech giant launched GPT-5 across its platforms.
“Today, GPT-5 launches across our platforms, including Microsoft 365 Copilot, Copilot, GitHub Copilot, and Azure AI Foundry,” Nadella wrote on X. “It’s the most capable model yet from our partners at OpenAI, bringing powerful new advances in reasoning, coding, and chat, all trained on Azure.”
Nadella noted that it had been only two and a half years since OpenAI CEO Sam Altman joined him in Redmond to debut GPT-4 in Bing, calling the progress since then “incredible”.
He added, “The pace of progress is only accelerating, and I can’t wait to see what developers, enterprises, and consumers will do with this latest breakthrough.”
“OpenAI is going to eat Microsoft alive,” Musk wrote in response.
Reacting to Musk’s warning, Nadella said, “People have been trying for 50 years and that’s the fun of it. Each day you learn something new and innovate, partner, and compete. Excited for Grok 4 on Azure and looking forward to Grok 5.”
Cursor AI, an AI-powered code editor based on Visual Studio Code, also confirmed GPT-5 integration.
The company called it “the most intelligent coding model our team has tested” and said it would be available free “for the time being.”
Musk, who backs the Grok AI platform, countered, “Except that Grok 4 Heavy is still the most powerful AI.”
Earlier, Altman recounted feeling “useless” after GPT-5 flawlessly solved a challenging email problem that had stumped him.
Speaking on a podcast on Thursday, he described it as a “weird feeling” to witness AI’s speed and precision.
While testing GPT-5, Altman admitted he was “scared” and likened the moment to the Manhattan Project.
Citing physicist Robert Oppenheimer, he suggested GPT-5 could have “permanent effects” on a similar scale, though not in a destructive sense.
OpenAI on Thursday rolled out ChatGPT-5 free to all users, touting “significant” capability upgrades as global competition in the AI sector heats up.
Altman described GPT-5 as “a model that is generally intelligent” and a “significant step” toward artificial general intelligence, though it does not yet learn continuously.
Comparing the leap in performance across versions, Altman said GPT-3 felt like a high school student, GPT-4 like a college student, and GPT-5 like a PhD-level expert.
The new model excels at autonomous “agent” tasks and “vibe coding”, generating apps on demand while being designed to be more trustworthy.
