xAI CEO Elon Musk has responded to an announcement by OpenAI that it is launching its GPT-5 model, framing it as a direct competition in the ongoing AI arms race. In a series of acerbic tweets, Musk claimed that his company’s Grok 4 Heavy is still the most powerful AI in the market and announced that Grok 5 will be launched by the end of the year to give the competitors a run for their money.
In a strong dig at Microsoft, which has a close relationship with OpenAI, Musk has told Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella that OpenAI will eat Microsoft alive. His remarks highlighted mounting tensions among the tech titans as AI capabilities and market stakes keep escalating.
Nadella, however, reacted coolly. “People have been trying for 50 years, and that’s the fun of it! Every day you learn something new, you innovate, partner, and compete, he said, implicitly accepting competition as well. Nadella continued that he was excited to see Grok 4 run on Azure and that he had been eagerly awaiting the release of Grok 5, noting the competition but not propagating the rivalry.
As a deliberate tactic to win the attention of users, Musk declared the new Imagine feature of Grok, which had the ability not only to produce images but also videos, would be made available free of charge to every user. This puts Grok in opposition to rivals such as OpenAI, Google, and others, the majority of whose video-generation tools, such as Sora and Veo 3, are behind paywalls. The strategy of Musk is transparent: gain loyalty with accessibility.
In the meantime, GPT-5 by OpenAI is a significant step toward AI capabilities, which are more efficient in coding, math, creative writing, healthcare, and visual perception. The model will be accessible to all ChatGPT users, but paid subscribers will have increased usage limits.
With the deep integration of OpenAI with Microsoft, GPT-5 is already being integrated into the company across Microsoft 365 Copilot, GitHub Copilot, Azure AI Foundry, and the Copilot app itself. In others, the GPT-5 access provided by Microsoft might be even superior to the one provided by OpenAI itself. The model itself is already live on the Copilot site on the Microsoft site, and OpenAI itself is expected to roll out to all users in days.
As Musk continues to talk up delivering Grok 5 by the end of the year and OpenAI continues to push GPT-5 further into Microsoft products, the AI race is heating up, and innovation, competition, and calculated trolling are all parts of the mix.
