OpenAI is working to build a social network that will compete against Elon Musk’s X and Meta’s Instagram, reports say. Though still in the early stages, the project is revolving around an internal prototype that is said to involve a social feed that leverages ChatGPT’s image generator. It’s unclear if an OpenAI social app would be standalone or integrated with ChatGPT, but either way it would most likely heighten the competition between rivals Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who recently fended off an unsolicited offer by Musk to purchase his company for $97.4 billion.

Altman’s response: “no thank you but we will buy Twitter for $9.74 billion if you want.”

“Entering the social media market also puts OpenAI on more of a collision course with Meta, which we’re told is planning to add a social feed to its coming standalone [AI] app,” The Verge reports, adding that “when reports of Meta building a rival to the ChatGPT app first surfaced a couple of months ago, Altman shot back on X again by saying, ‘ok fine maybe we’ll do a social app.’”

“A social app would also give OpenAI its own unique, real-time data that X and Meta already have to help train their AI models,” The Verge says, noting that Musk’s xAI company, which recently absorbed X social, allows its Grok chatbot to “surface content from X in its results,” adding that Meta also trains its Llama AI model “on its vast trove of user data.”

“Essentially, AI projects need massive amounts of data, ideally flowing into their circuits in a steady stream, and OpenAI, at this stage, doesn’t have anywhere near the ongoing data resources of its competitors,” Social Media Today reports. “Publishers are looking to restrict OpenAI’s access to their content.”

The heightened interest around an OpenAI social app comes weeks after Reuters reported Microsoft has killed plans for several new data centers, a move “largely led by the decision not to support additional training workloads from ChatGPT maker OpenAI.”