The location was apt: The Pioneer Building in the city’s Mission district, a 122-year-old former truck factory, and most recently, headquarters of OpenAI, the juggernaut maker of ChatGPT led by cofounder Sam Altman. xAI had just moved into the building, Musk said, attendees told Forbes.

An LLC affiliated with Elon Musk's xAI is seeking to enter into a long-term lease with an option to purchase a huge plot of land in the Memphis area near a planned Tennessee site for a supercomputer.

It was held by Elon Musk at the original Mission District headquarters of OpenAI, which Musk cofounded before leaving after (reportedly) failing to take it over. And Musk was there to convince people to join his latest startup,

The competitors include Anthropic, Elon Musk’s xAI, and Safe Superintelligence (SSI), a startup launched by OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever. These companies directly compete with OpenAI in advancing large language models, a capital-intensive effort.

San Francisco's Mission district isn't known for corporate offices, but it's now home to two of the world's most well-funded AI startups. Elon Musk's

Musk and a spokesperson for OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment. While the request for an exclusive funding round is rare, it's not unprecedented, according to venture

OpenAI received $6.6 billion in investment recently and is now valued at $157 billion. Interestingly, OpenAI does not want it its investors to fund competition and has reportedly shared a list of companies to stay away from.

Elon Musk called OpenAI “evil” after the tech giant asked investors for exclusive arrangements that would prevent them from investing in competitors such as Musk’s xAI. OpenAI, makers of generative artificial intelligence ChatGPT,