OpenAI is working on its own X-like social network, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter.
While the project is still in early stages, we’re told there’s an internal prototype focused on ChatGPT’s image generation that has a social feed. CEO Sam Altman has been privately asking outsiders for feedback about the project, our sources say. It’s unclear if OpenAI’s plan is to release the social network as a separate app or integrate it into ChatGPT, which became the most downloaded app globally last month. An OpenAI spokesperson didn’t respond in time for publication.
Launching a social network in or around ChatGPT would likely increase Altman’s already-bitter rivalry with Elon Musk. In February, after Musk ma
73 Comments
jsnider3
With all the other social networks trying to keep their data private because they all want to try their own AIs, it makes sense that OpenAI would want to have its own social network that wouldn't charge them for the data. I still doubt they actually launch it.
bhouston
I've always thought that the social networks like X and BlueSky are sort of like the distributed consciousness of society. It is what society, as a whole / in aggregate, is currently thinking about and knowing its ebbs and flows and what it responds to are important if you want to have up to date AI.
So yeah, AI integrated with a popular social network is valuable.
beloch
>One idea behind the OpenAI social prototype, we’ve heard, is to have AI help people share better content. “The Grok integration with X has made everyone jealous,” says someone working at another big AI lab. “Especially how people create viral tweets by getting it to say something stupid.”
This would be a decent PR stunt, but would such a platform offer anything of value?
It might be more valuable to set AI to the task of making the most human social platform out there. Right now, Facebook, TikTok, Reddit, etc. are all rife with bots, spam, and generative AI junk. Finding good content in this sea of noise is becoming increasingly difficult. A social media platform that uses AI to filter out spam, bots, and other AI with the goal of making human content easy to access might really catch on. Set a thief to catch thieves.
Who are we kidding. It's going to be Will Smith eating spaghetti all the way down.
numpad0
A 4chan but images can be prompt generated? Makes sense. Everything's going back to early 2000s, it seems.
kittikitti
I would try to make a platform like Deviantart or Tumblr except OpenAI pays you to make good content that the AI is trained on.
blitzar
This is just part of the ongoing feud between Sama and Musk.
andrewstuart
They should use their resources to make OpenAI good at coding.
siva7
Sam got a jawline lift, anyone noticed?
labrador
It'd be cool to see Google+ resurrected with OpenAI branding. Google+ was actually a pretty well designed social network
chazeon
I think a social network is not necessarily a timeline-based product, but an LLM-native/enabled group chat can probably be a very interesting product. Remember, ChatGPT itself is already a chat.
candiddevmike
What else are they going to spend billions on to turn a profit?
swyx
https://web.archive.org/web/20250415160251/https://www.theve…
outside1234
Aren't they unprofitable enough already?
pedalpete
https://archive.is/qU4am
pontus
Is this just a data play? Need more data. Start a social network. Own said data.
prvc
Is making yet another twitter clone really the way to build a path towards super-intelligence? A worthy use of the organization's talent?
philipov
Imagine that, a social network where all of the participants are bots.
tiffanyh
My guess … it's probably less of a "social network" and more of a "they are trying to build a destination (portal) where users go to daily".
E.g. old days of Yahoo (portal)
mushufasa
Sounds like they are thinking about instagram, which originated as a phone app to apply filters to a camera and share with friends (like texting or emailing them or sending them a link to a hosted page), and evolved into a social network. Their new image generation feature has enough people organically sharing content that they probably are thinking about hosting that content on pages, then adding permissions + follow features to all of their existing users' accounts.
honestly it's not a terrible idea. it may be a distraction from their core purpose, but it's probably something they can test and learn from within a ~90 day cycle.
clonedhuman
AI bots already make up a significant percentage of users on most social networks. Might as well just take the mask off completely–soon, we'll all be having conversations (arguments, most likely) with 'users' with no real human anywhere near them.
janalsncm
An idea which sounds horrifying but would probably be pretty popular: a Facebook like feed where all of your “friends” are bots and give you instant gratification, praise, and support no matter what you post. Solves the network effect because it scales from zero.
einrealist
This is Altman increasing the mass of the investment black hole that OpenAI is.
paulvnickerson
Sam Altman is retaliating against Musk for Grok and Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI, trying to ride the wave of anti-Musk political heat, and figure out a way to pull in more training data due to copyright troubles.
If they launch, expect a big splash with many claiming it is the X-killer (i.e. the same people that claimed the same of Mastadon, Threads, and Bluesky), especially around here at HN, and then nobody will talk about it anymore after a few months.
frabona
Feels like a natural next step, honestly. If they already have users generating tons of content via ChatGPT, hosting it natively and adding light social features might just be a way to keep people engaged and coming back. Not sure if it's meant to compete with Twitter/Instagram, or just quietly become another daily habit for users
Nijikokun
ngl building a social network isn't hard, getting people to use a social network is the hard part
abc-1
Hahaha they’re cooked. GPT 4.5 was a massive flop. GPT 4.1 is barely an improvement after over a year. Now they’re grasping at straws. Anyone actually in this field who wasn’t a grifter knew improvements are sigmoidal.
All the original talent has already left too.
Apocryphon
We've got gen AI now and no ZIRP yet this is all they can think of, Web 2.0 will never die.
basisword
I can’t think of anything less appealing or interesting. AI content as a destination has zero appeal.
randomor
Controversial opinion: it's not about the generator of the content, human or not, but about the originality of the content itself. Human with the help of AI will generate more good quality as a result.
Humans are just as good as bots in generating rubbish content, if not more so.
Twitter reduced content production cost significantly, AI can take it another step down.
At minimum, a social network where people share good prompt engineering techniques will be valuable to people who are on the hunt for prompts. Just like the Midjourney website, except creating a high quality image is no longer a trip to the beach, but a thought experiment. This will also significantly cut down the cold start friction and in combination with some free credits, people may have more reasons to stay, as the current chat based business model may reach it's limit for revenue generation and retention, as it's just single player mode.
gorgoiler
The analogy is with Iain Banks’ The Culture.
Anyone can be anything and do anything they want in an abundant, machine assisted world. The connections, cliques, friends and network you cultivate are more important than ever before if you want to be heard above the noise. Sheer talent has long fallen by the wayside as a differentiator.
…or alternatively it’s not The Culture at all. Is live performance the new, ahem, rock star career? In fifty years time all the lawyers and engineers and bankers will be working two jobs for minimum wage. The real high earners will be the ones who can deliver live, unassisted art that showcases their skills with instruments and their voice.
Those who are truly passionate about the law will only be able to pursue it as a barely-living-wage hobby while being advised to “not give up the night job” — their main, stable source of income — as a cabaret singer. They might be a journalist or a programmer in their twenties for fun before economics forces them to settle down and get a real, stable job: starting a rock band.
tomrod
Maybe, but Substack is building a much mote engaging social network. I'm frankly amazed at how good it is.
shaftoe444
Logical conclusion of AI is to generate slop for slop feeds so why not own your own slop feed.
rglover
I speculated a ways back [1] that this was why Elon Musk bought Twitter. Not to "control the discourse" but to get unfettered access to real, live human thought that you can train an AI against.
My guess is OpenAI has hit limits with "produced" content (e.g., books, blog posts, etc) and think they can fill in the gaps in the LLMs ability to "think" by leveraging raw, unpolished social data (and the social graph).
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31397703
danity
Just what the world needs, another social network!
Duanemclemore
I haven't been happier online in the last 10 years than after I stopped checking social media. And in that miserable time it wasn't even a naked beg for training data like this.
But I really don't see why anyone would even use an open ai "social network" in the first place.
It does allow one thing for open ai. Other than training data which admittedly will probably be pretty low quality. It is a natural venue for ad sales.
throw_m239339
What would be the point? Why would it even need real members?
uptownfunk
It’s all whatever will maximize valuation. They can do it until antitrust comes for them.
lukev
This kind of news should be a death-knell for OpenAI.
If you've built your value on promising imminent AGI then this sort of thing is purely a distraction, and you wouldn't even be considering it… unless you knew you weren't about to shortly offer AGI.
beambot
Makes me (further) believe that Reddit is heavily undervalued…
Nevermark
A social network that faithfully and intelligently curated posts according to my own continuously updated (explicit) direction would be most excellent.
But it would also juice echo chamber depth and further amplify extremist "engagement".
And the monetary incentives for OpenAI to generate most of the content, the "people", and the ads, including creative hallucinations and novel extremisms, so they directly match each of our curation directions, would enshittify the whole thing within a short minute.
—
The time has come to outlaw conflict of interest businesses that scale (the conflict).
If a startup plan includes "sales" and "customers": Green light go.
If it talks about ways to "monetize": Red trash can.
If only.
misonic
this sounds not appealing to me, what extra value would it provide? why do I need a new X with AI support, making friends with Agents/Bots?
xpl
One interesting benefit is that OpenAI would be able to detect bots using their APIs to generate content.
aussieguy1234
LLM -> Social Media Platform -> Tiktok clone.
That would be an interesting evolution.
mrandish
Okay, thinking charitably here… maybe a play at getting training data they don't have to steal? (although it does seem like rotating the ladder instead of the lightbulb…)
gerash
I believe the play here is:
1. Look "Studio Ghibli" went viral, let's capitalize
2. Switching cost for LLMs are low. If we can't be the best let's find other ways to lock our users in and make our product super sticky
BrenBarn
So Facebook is trying to get into AI (e.g. its chatbot-"user" debacle) and OpenAI wants to form its own social network. Our world is becoming the recycled shit-food of this technological ouroboros.
tossandthrow
The American play book: make some innovation but do a bait and switch and focus all energy on value extraction.
karel-3d
AI generated posts and images and nonstop posting about AI? That sounds like LinkedIn in 2025.
Iolaum
Maybe before building a social network, you should be able to share the result of an answer with another user, even if they have not paid/subscribed.
Tried to share an answer to a colleague (who didn't have the paid version) and he couldn't see it …
pluto_modadic
They know AI can be addictive (people will prompt it far too often), so mixing it with social media can captivate users even more effectively.
beaugunderson
> While the project is still in early stages, we’re told there’s an internal prototype focused on ChatGPT’s image generation that has a social feed.
isn't it public already? they basically made tumblr but everything is AI:
https://sora.com/explore
interludead
Curious to see if this leans more "creative community" or "algorithmic content zoo."
paride5745
It makes no sense to build a social network nowadays.
With Mastodon and Bluesky around, users have free options. Plus X and Threads, and you can see how the market is more than saturated.
IMHO they should look into close collaboration/minority stake with Bluesky or Reddit instead. You have a huge pool of users already, without the need to build it up from the ground up from scratch.
Heck, OpenAI probably has enough money to just buy Reddit if they want.
GeorgeCurtis
The whole value proposition of a social media is that everyone you know (almost) is on it. That's why young people don't use Facebook.
They'd be better off buying one
svara
I guess where this is all going in the long run is something with an interface similar to TikTok, where the user gives rapid feedback to train an algorithm to generate content that they "love", er, that maximally tickles their reward circuitry.
buyucu
openai is getting crushed by competitors who are offeering more cost-effective alternatives.
so sam altman is pressing all buttons to keep the hype train going.
nottorp
… for bots. The "AI" bots are lonely and this will let them talk to each other.
camkego
I suspect they are searching for network effects, otherwise they know the switching costs are too low for their users
robert-whiteley
Counter opinion – What tech people don't seem to realise about AI is that putting it into a user-friendly format for the average person is what has led to this current revolution, i.e. ChatGPT
This is just the next step of that. This also doesn't stop them working on 'AGI', you need the data as well as the models, as most people familiar with the field will known. I will be happy to be proven wrong on this prediction.
WASDAai
[dead]
INTPenis
The aversion to robots in Fediverse suddenly makes a lot of sense.
I don't want to live on the internet that is crammed with AI content.
gtirloni
Social networks are the TODO list app of rich people, apparently.
trilbyglens
What a dumbfuck article. It's essentially a gossip-rag level story based on a few random and meaningless tweets from a couple of billionaire douchebags.
umagamdrup
[dead]
thatgerhard
this is starting to feel a lot like the ~15 years ago where everyone wanted a social network
sharathnarayan
May be they need the social media data to improve their models? X and Meta have an edge here
antirez
Isn't Gemini 2.5 the proof you don't need social network alike data for training?
seafoamteal
So… one stop shop to generate slop and send it out into the ether to be recycled into more slop.
nbzso
Scam Altman is running out of "options". Serial failing is SV current business model.
arjunaaqa
If they simply take Chatgpt profiles, a button to share with others, and add a follow button for every qa pair.
– They have a quick social network with feed of qna with AI (like stackoverflow) immediately.
anentropic
> “The Grok integration with X has made everyone jealous,” says someone working at another big AI lab. “Especially how people create viral tweets by getting it to say something stupid.”
It's awesome to see the amazing value for society being created by big tech these days.
fhd2
I wonder to what degree this move would be genuine company strategy, and to what degree it'd just be what the sub headline says: "Is Sam Altman ready to up his rivalry with Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg?"
paradox242
They have to feed the beast with a never ending supply of input.