Altman vs. Musk: OpenAI’s ‘Yeets’ Takes Aim at X with AI-Powered Social Media

Sam Altman’s OpenAI is reportedly developing and conducting early testing for a social media platform tentatively named Yeets.

Yeets is a social media service similar to X, and is directly targeting CEO Elon Musk’s platform. With ChatGPT integrated—a platform used by over 800 million users globally—the launch of such a service could mark a dramatic shift in the social media landscape.

According to the IT industry and foreign media on Thursday, OpenAI has launched a social platform development project and is internally referring to it as Yeets. The name is said to evoke tweet, the former name of X, suggesting a direct jab at Musk’s platform.

There is speculation that the development of OpenAI’s social media platform may have been influenced by the recent surge in popularity of Ghibli-style (inspired by Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli) image generation using ChatGPT-4o. A flood of Ghibli-style profile pictures and other image content created through ChatGPT has spread widely via X and Instagram, inadvertently helping rival platforms amass large datasets.

Altman himself has used X as a key external communication channel. To promote the Ghibli-style trend, he changed his X profile picture to a Ghibli-style image and posted related images multiple times on the platform.

Platforms like xAI and Meta are utilizing vast datasets generated on their respective social platforms to train their AI models—LLaMA and Grok. The popularity of Ghibli and other animation styles likely contributed to the accumulation of massive image datasets.

Industry watchers and foreign media predict that OpenAI’s entry into social media will be more than just a service expansion. Leveraging its base of over 800 million ChatGPT users, the company could significantly disrupt the current dominance of X, Instagram, and Facebook.

Running its own social platform would also allow OpenAI to generate new advertising revenue. In Meta’s case, $47.8 billion out of its $48.4 billion revenue in Q4 last year came from advertising, highlighting the strength of its ad business.

Meanwhile, Altman and Musk continue to have a hostile relationship.

Musk filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleging that OpenAI violated its founding agreement by receiving a 13 billion USD investment from Microsoft and providing it with AI technologies. After the court decided the case would proceed to a jury trial, OpenAI filed a countersuit against Musk, demanding that he cease his malicious conduct.

The two also clashed during the announcement of the Stargate Project, a 500 billion USD-scale initiative. Musk submitted a proposal to the OpenAI board to acquire the nonprofit entity that controls OpenAI for 97.4 billion USD, which he also posted on X. In response, Altman declined, saying, “No thank you,” and counter-offered to buy Twitter for $9.74 billion if Musk insisted.