OpenAI cofounders Sam Altman and Elon Musk have been increasingly sniping at one other, and—as noted in Friday’s Data Sheet—their mutual animosity goes back a while. According to a fascinating Semafor report last week, Musk tried to take over OpenAI several years ago, only to be rebuffed. The rest is history: Musk and his money walked away, and OpenAI soon succumbed to Microsoft’s $1 billion (now circa $13 billion) embrace in order to pay for all that expensive data-crunching.
Well, here’s a new thing for Musk and Altman to feud over: Late last week, the Norwegian robotics company 1X (until recently known as Halodi) announced the closure of a Series A2 funding round worth $23.5 million, with the lead investor being none other than the Microsoft-backed OpenAI Startup Fund.
