Sam Altman says Slack creates ‘fake work’; Elon Musk renews warning for Microsoft

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said that the popular messaging app Slack leads to a lot of ‘fake work’. Altman then went to add that there is potential for replacing it with an AI driven alternative which could also replicate some of the work done by Microsoft Office.

In an interaction on the Conversations with Tyler YouTube channel, Altman said, “There are positives about Slack there's also like kind of dread the first hour of the morning, the last hour before I go to bed, where I'm just dealing with this explosion of Slack.”

“I think it does create a lot of fake work, I suspect there is something new to build that is going to replace a lot of the current sort of office productivity suite, whatever you think of, like Docs, Slides, emails, Slack, whatever. That will be sort of the AI-driven version of all of these things.” he added

The statement by Altman gave his long time nemesis Elon Musk another opportunity to fire away a warning to Microsoft. Replying to a video of Altman's comment, Musk said, “As I was saying, OpenAI will compete directly with Microsoft”

“At this point, it’s insanely suicidal for Microsoft to continue supporting OpenAI” Musk wrote in response to another post.

“OpenAI is going to eat Microsoft alive” Musk had remarked in a post.

"People have been trying for 50 years and that’s the fun of it! Each day you learn something new, and innovate, partner, and compete." Nadella had responded back then

OpenAI has indeed been releasing newer products that compete with its biggest backer like the Atlas browser or search feature directly within ChatGPT. However, Musk himself has earlier said that he wants to develop an AI backed rival to Microsoft called ‘Macrohard’.

The billionaire also runs xAI that develops Grok AI chatbot which is trying to take a major chunk in the AI race including from the likes of Microsoft. Meanwhile, Microsoft still majorly relies on the models from OpenAI to power a lot of AI features in not just Bing but even its Office apps. The company has, however, begun to prefer Claude AI in some of the recently launched features for Office.