Musk and Zuckerberg might channel their cage-fight anger on a new, shared enemy: ChatGPT

• Artificial intelligence could become the next battleground for Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.
• The Tesla CEO said Wednesday that he planned to launch a new company, called xAI.

Artificial intelligence could become the next battleground in the ongoing feud between Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Meta Platforms boss Mark Zuckerberg.

The two billionaires – who've been trading barbs online since Musk summoned Zuckerberg to a cage fight last month – are working to challenge the dominance of ChatGPT owner OpenAI.

Musk formally launched a new venture called xAI on Wednesday. The company's website says it's already hired engineers away from DeepMind, OpenAI, and Microsoft in a bid to "understand the true nature of the universe".

The following day, the Financial Times reported that Zuckerberg's Meta is positioned to release a commercial version of its generative AI language model, known as LLaMA, to start-ups and other businesses. It's currently only available to academics.

It's clear that both tech titans want to develop companies that can rival OpenAI, whose intelligent language bot ChatGPT has taken the world by storm this year.

Musk, who co-founded OpenAI but left Sam Altman's company in 2018, incorporated xAI four months ago. He has rapidly acquired thousands of high-power GPU chips from Nvidia to power the project, people familiar with the matter previously told Insider.

Meanwhile, the publication reported Thursday that a person "with knowledge of high-level strategy at Meta" said the company's main goal in releasing LLaMA to a wider audience was "to diminish the current dominance of OpenAI".

The billionaires have been locked in a cringeworthy online spat for the past three weeks, which started when Musk said he was "up for a cage match" in response to a Twitter user who pointed out Zuckerberg's newfound jiu-jitsu prowess.

Zuckerberg responded by telling Musk to "send [him his] location", setting the stage for a physical confrontation. Insider tech reporter (and resident combat sports expert) Hasan Chowdhury believes that Zuckerberg would have the edge in that one.

The feud then shifted to the business world last week when Meta launched its long-anticipated Twitter rival Threads, which reached 100 million users at an even faster pace than ChatGPT.