Top tech leaders battling for AI supremacy — while spending billions and slinging mud along the way

Call it the ultimate science fair competition, but this one’s in a UFC octagon.

The smartest and most competitive people in the world – including Elon Musk and Sam Altman – are competing in a gloves-off battle for AI supremacy.

Legal threats, employee poaching, social-media mudslinging and shake ups by a dark-horse contender from the other side of the Earth are not off limits in this match.

Collateral damage comes with the territory. In the latest salvo this week, Musk threatened to sue Apple for antitrust violations over alleged favoritism toward Sam Altman’s OpenAI, which it has a partnership with. Altman and Apple both denied this.

Altman shot back with an accusation of his own, alleging Musk “manipulate[s] X to benefit himself and his own companies and harm his competitors and people he doesn’t like.” Musk described the post as “bull—t” and called Altman a “liar” and their bickering continued online into the evening.

All of this is from rich, brilliant guys creating high tech innovations that promise to transform the world.

But, then, perhaps that is the driving force behind all the aggravation in their bids for global domination.

“He who controls AI systems can have enormous power to shape people’s opinions,” Gary Marcus, well-known AI skeptic and New York University professor emeritus, told The Post.

“It’s about power; giving them control of a lot of information is a kind of power. They [each] want to be able to dictate how the world goes.”

Altman and Musk are not alone. Also competing in the battle-for-influence – perhaps going at it just as aggressively, but with a softer touch: Microsoft bolstered by a battalion of users, Mark Zuckerberg and his money-bagged Meta, Apple with hardware that the world loves, and Google sporting its ubiquitous search capabilities.

Coming out of China and making waves is the AI effort DeepSeek, the brainchild of Liang Wenfeng, who also cofounded the hedge fund High-Flyer. DeepSeek shook up the AI world, in part, because it was developed for less than $6 million, compared with the hundreds of millions sunk into AI by US companies.

Each entity has its own strengths in this battle. Arguably leading the race is OpenAI, which was first to market with its Chat GPT product, which has become the go-to AI for most.

“ChatGPT has really broken away from the pack,” Tony Wang, a T. Rowe Price portfolio manager, said Thursday on CNBC’s Squawk Box. “In terms of consumer engagement, ChatGPT is off the charts here.”

Musk was a founding partner in OpenAI and left under stormy conditions that derived from his wanting it to be free and open source. That happened in 2018, one year before Microsoft began investing in OpenAI; over the years, it has put in close to $14 billion.

Last year Musk sued Altman and OpenAI for moving away from the company’s original mission. In April OpenAI countersued Musk claiming he was making “harassing legal claims and a sham bid” that he alleged could have hurt the company. Musk asked for that claim to be dismissed. On Tuesday, US District judge Yvonne Gonzalez ruled that the countersuit will stand. A jury trial is scheduled for next year.

Considering the bad blood, Faiz Siddiqui, author of the Musk biography “Hubris Maximus: The Shattering of Elon Musk,” can see how Musk’s search-engine built into X, Grok, coming behind ChatGPT would leave the richest man in the world vexed.

“There’s history between Musk and Altman,” emphasized Siddiqui. “Elon is building a sort of walled garden for himself. He has his own social media sites, his own chatbot and in some ways his own echo chamber that hypes up these things that he builds. But he still craves outside recognition.”

Over in Silicon Valley, one billionaire who appeared to be behind the pack recently appears to have woken up from the taken off his Metaverse goggles and realized he needed to take action.

Zuckerberg has been on a gargantuan spending spree to fuel his quest to achieve superintelligence aka Artificial General Intelligence, the point machines can match and replicate human brainpower.

He has been aggressively offering previously unheard of employment packages, paying out more then $1 billion to build an all-star team. He’s lured the former head of Apple’s AI models team, Ruoming Pang, to join his Superintelligence Labs and put together a rumored $250 million pay package to lock in just one super-geek, Matt Deitke, who is – incredibly – just 24.

Altman claimed Zuckerberg was offering $100 million pay packages to poach his top guys, which a Meta exec called “dishonest.” However, although no numbers were disclosed, a handful of AI sharpshooters made the move from OpenAI to Meta a week later.