By Alex Kantrowitz

Sam Altman sat comfortably between Satya Nadella and Sundar Pichai at a White House gathering of top AI CEOs in May — with a noticeable gap among them. With Alphabet, Microsoft, and OpenAI in attendance, it was impossible to miss Mark Zuckerberg’s absence. And that appeared to be no accident. The meeting, one administration official said, “was focused on companies currently leading in the space.” Political symbolism is overrated, but the words must’ve stung.

Ever since the gathering, Zuckerberg and Meta have rapidly shipped products that compete directly with Altman’s OpenAI, opening up one of the most intense — and overlooked — battles in tech today. Meta’s countered OpenAI’s GPT-4 with Llama 2, its own large language model that’s open-source and more customizable. It’s responded to ChatGPT with more than two dozen specialized chatbots in its messaging apps. It’s advocated for a more permissive AI research environment, opposing OpenAI’s call for controls. And today, nobody would leave Meta outside the room. “They probably have forced the issue,” one DC insider told me.