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Sam Altman shares Ghibli photo with Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO responds

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ChatGPT maker OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has shared a Ghibli photo with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella . In a post on Twitter, Altman wrote, "fun showing @satyanadella our new office and talking about some of our latest progress!" He shared a Ghibli photo of himself along with Nadella with the Twitter post.

Nadella responded to OpenAI CEO's Ghibli Photo post. "Great to see you today, @sama. Love the new office!," wrote Microsoft CEO. What makes the post interesting is that it comes just a day after the Wall Street Journal's news article titled "Altman and Nadella, Who Ignited the Modern AI Boom Together, Are Drifting Apart'.



Reported tension between Sam Altman and Satya Nadella

The almost 500-plus words article claims how the OpenAI and Microsoft CEOs helped each other become power players in generative AI but are now preparing for independent futures. "Sam Altman once said OpenAI and Microsoft had the “best partnership in tech.” Now, their Silicon Valley marriage is on the rocks," is how the article starts

The crux of the WSJ article is that the once strong partnership between Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman appears to be facing some strain, moving from frequent daily communication to less regular contact. This cooling period is said to be possible due to several factors. Microsoft's acquisition of the Inflection AI team to build its own AI models could signal a move towards greater independence. Microsoft reportedly paid $650 million to hire Mustafa Suleyman and his colleagues at startup Inflection. Suleyman, who is one of the three co-founders of Google’s DeepMind, began work building a large language model that aimed to rival what was then OpenAI’s most advanced publicly released technology, GPT-4.



There are also reports of disagreements on the timeline for achieving AGI and OpenAI's alleged slowness in sharing advanced model code. Furthermore, Altman's "Stargate" project, a large AI data center initiative involving Oracle and SoftBank but notably excluding Microsoft, has raised eyebrows. While both companies remain closely linked through investments and integrations, these developments suggest a shift in their dynamic as they navigate the rapidly evolving AI landscape.

Riding on Ghibli fame
Incidentally, Ghibli-style AI art became a frenzy when ChatGPT's image-generation tool GPT-4o launched in March end. The tool led to a record surge in users for OpenAI's chatbot, straining its servers and temporarily limiting the feature's usage. The viral trend saw users from across the globe flood social media with images based on the hand-drawn style of the famed Japanese animation outfit, Studio Ghibli, founded by renowned director Hayao Miyazaki.

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