The battle between Iron Man and Ultraman has already unfolded in the United States, and it's even more exciting than in the movies. It's a simple yet relentless business war fueled by the burning of dollars.

This Ultraman is none other than OpenAI's CEO, Sam Altman, while Iron Man is none other than Elon Musk.

On September 11, a day of special significance to the United States, Bloomberg reported that OpenAI was once again seeking funding. This time, they aimed to raise $6.5 billion at a valuation of $150 billion. Additionally, they were also considering borrowing $5 billion from banks through a revolving credit facility.

This valuation is almost double that of the end of last year.

Meanwhile, Musk hasn't given up on AI despite his endeavors in rocketry and automobiles. His X AI, which was founded less than a year and a half ago, has already emerged as a formidable rival to OpenAI. Currently valued at $24 billion, X AI secured a single round of funding of up to $6 billion, making it a hot commodity in Silicon Valley.

Musk isn't just about tweeting and engaging in verbal sparring; he's ready to roll up his sleeves and get into a physical fight if need be!

So, how does it feel to see dollars flying all over the screen?

Of course, burning through so many dollars has yielded some results. Apart from chatGPT4, X AI's Grok model has also demonstrated remarkable capabilities.

If you were Ultraman, with the world's richest man, who can build rockets and cars, hot on your heels, determined to take down your core business, wouldn't you be worried?

OpenAI hasn't had an easy ride over the past two years. On one hand, they've been burning through cash at an alarming rate, and on the other, internal management issues have plagued them, creating both internal and external challenges.

Take OpenAI's most significant funding round in January 2023, for instance. Microsoft invested a whopping $10 billion, but within two years, that entire amount had been exhausted.

Moreover, shortly thereafter, media outlets predicted that OpenAI's losses for the year could exceed $5 billion, necessitating a new round of funding soon.

Unfortunately, these predictions proved accurate.

As for internal strife, OpenAI has seen its share of drama. Of the original 11 co-founders, only two remain. Recently, it was announced that Alexis Conneau, a key figure behind GPT-4 and GPT-5, would also be leaving OpenAI. It seems that being Ultraman isn't always easy.

What about Musk on the other side?

Compared to OpenAI's turmoil, Musk's X AI has had a much smoother ride.

In fact, Musk and Altman were once allies, both co-founding OpenAI. However, they fell out over whether OpenAI should prioritize profit now.

Altman accepted a massive investment from Microsoft, which Musk fiercely criticized, accusing Altman of betraying OpenAI's original intentions and allowing it to become a Microsoft subsidiary.

Altman didn't back down, publicly calling Musk a "jerk" in return.

As the world's richest man, Musk isn't short on funds. When collaboration failed, he struck out on his own, founding X AI and directly challenging OpenAI.

With the backing of his financial might, X AI's strength has soared. On the 3rd of this month, Musk announced the official launch of Colossus, a super AI training cluster composed of 100,000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs. He also promised to double the GPU count to 200,000 in the coming months, including 50,000 NVIDIA H200s.

GPUs are the productivity tools of AI computing power, and they are a finite resource. Once they're gone, they're gone. Only financial might can solve this problem.

As Musk himself put it, in the battle for AI, you either win or you don't play at all. In the battle between Ultraman and Iron Man, there are no ties.