Elon Musk on Wednesday visited the Tesla Gigafactory near Berlin, which was forced to halt production last week after losing power during a suspected arson attack.

Pictures show Musk waving to workers as he arrived at the factory in German state Brandenburg and addressing them on stage in a tent where employees gathered to meet him.

Local media also reported that Musk told the crowd “I love you” in German, but that his further comments were drowned out by a factory vehicle parking in front of journalists and blasting music.

Musk is expected to meet regional politicians during his visit to Germany, local media said, citing state government sources. CNBC could not independently verify the reports.

Last week, the Gigafactory was left without power and had to temporarily stop production after a suspected arson on an electric substation close by. Tesla said that the incident was aimed at the company, in a statement on social media platform X.

Left-wing extremist group ‘Vulkangruppe’ claimed responsibility for the attack in a letter posted online, criticizing Tesla’s environmental competencies. Regional authorities are still investigating the case.

The Brandenburg factory is slated for expansion, but the project has met significant resistance from locals and environmental groups, as it would mean the destruction of forests in the area. Activists have set up camp near the factory in protest.

The plant was able to rejoin the power grid earlier this week. Production resumed at the Gigafactory on Wednesday, Michaela Schmitz, chair of the works council at the plant, told local radio channel rbb24, according to a CNBC translation.

Employees received their full salaries during the production outage, she added.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin, in a rare public appearance over the weekend, told a group of artificial intelligence enthusiasts that he came out of retirement “because the trajectory of AI is so exciting.”

Brin, 50, spoke to entrepreneurs on Saturday at the “AGI House” in Hillsborough, California, just south of San Francisco, where developers and founders were testing Google’s Gemini model. AGI stands for artificial general intelligence and refers to a form of AI that can complete tasks to the same level, or a step above, humans.

In taking questions from the crowd, Brin discussed AI’s impact on search and how Google can maintain its leadership position in its core market as AI continues to grow. He also commented on the flawed launch last month of Google’s image generator, which the company pulled after users discovered historical inaccuracies and questionable responses.

“We definitely messed up on the image generation,” Brin said Saturday. “I think it was mostly due to just not thorough testing. It definitely, for good reasons, upset a lot of people.”

Google said last week that it plans to relaunch the image generation feature soon.

Brin co-founded Google with Larry Page in 1998, but stepped down as president of Alphabet in 2019. He remains a board member and a principal shareholder, with a stake in the company worth about $100 billion. He’s returned to work at the company as part of an effort to help ramp up Google’s position in the hypercompetitive AI market.

In some cases on Saturday, Brin said he was giving “personal” answers, as opposed to representing the company.

“Seeing what these models can do year after year is astonishing,” he said at the event, a recording of which was viewed by CNBC.

Regarding the recent challenges with Gemini that led to flawed image results, Brin said the company isn’t quite sure why responses have a leftward tilt, in the political sense.

“We haven’t fully understood why it leans left in many cases” but “that’s not our intention,” he said. The company has recently made accuracy improvements by as much as 80% on certain internal tests, Brin added.

Brin’s comments represent the first time a company executive has spoken on the Gemini matter in a live setting. The company previously sent prepared statements from Prabhakar Raghavan, Google’s head of search, and CEO Sundar Pichai in response to the controversial rollout.

Here’s what Raghavan said in a blog post on Feb. 23:

“So what went wrong? In short, two things. First, our tuning to ensure that Gemini showed a range of people failed to account for cases that should clearly not show a range. And second, over time, the model became way more cautious than we intended and refused to answer certain prompts entirely — wrongly interpreting some very anodyne prompts as sensitive. These two things led the model to overcompensate in some cases, and be over-conservative in others, leading to images that were embarrassing and wrong.”

Google declined to comment for this story. Brin didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. 

Brin said Google is far from alone in its struggles to produce accurate results with AI. He cited OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Elon Musk’s Grok services as AI tools that, “say some pretty weird things that are out there that definitely feel far left, for example.”

Hallucinations, or false responses to a user’s prompt, are still “a big problem right now,” he said. “No question about it.”

“We have made them hallucinate less and less over time, but I’d definitely be excited to see a breakthrough that’s near-zero,” Brin said. “But you can’t just like — count on breakthroughs so I think we’re just going to keep doing the incremental things we do to bring it down, down, down over time.”

When asked by an attendee if he wants to build AGI, Brin answered in the affirmative, citing the ability for AI to help with “reasoning.”

Brin was also asked how online advertising will be disrupted considering ad revenue is core to Google’s business. The company has reported slowing ad growth in the last few years.

“I of all people am not too terribly concerned about business model shifts,” Brin said. “I think it’s wonderful that we’ve been now for 25 years, or whatever, able to give just world-class information search for free to everyone and that’s supported by advertising, which in my mind is great for the world.”

He did acknowledge that the business is likely to change.

“I expect business models are going to evolve over time,” he said. “And maybe it will still be advertising because advertising could work better, the AI is able to better tailor it.”

Brin is confident in Google’s position.

“I personally feel as long as there’s huge value being generated, we’ll figure out the business models,” he said.

Beyond AI, Brin was asked about Google’s difficulties in hardware given recent advancements in virtual reality. Google was notoriously early to the augmented reality market with the now-defunct Google Glass.

“I feel like I made some bad decisions,” he said, referring to Google Glass. If he were doing it differently, Brin said, he would have the treated Google Glass as a prototype instead of a product. “But, I’m still a fan of the lightweight” form, he said.

In regard to the Apple Vision Pro and Meta’s Quest headsets, Brin said, “They’re very impressive.”

When asked about how he sees Gemini impacting spatial computing or products like Google Maps or Street view, Brin responded with as much curiosity as anything.

“To be honest, I haven’t thought about it, but now that you say it, yeah there’s no reason we couldn’t put in more 3D data,” Brin said, to laughs from the crowd. “Maybe somebody’s doing it at Gemini — I don’t know.”

WATCH: Google vs. Google

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OpenAI executives disputed claims Elon Musk laid out in a lawsuit on Thursday, and said the Tesla CEO is upset that he’s no longer part of the artificial intelligence startup.

“We believe the claims in this suit may stem from Elon’s regrets about not being involved with the company today,” wrote OpenAI Chief Strategy Officer Jason Kwon in an internal memo on Friday that was viewed by CNBC. “It is deeply disappointing to see Elon take this action against a company he helped start, especially given his close collaboration with some of you who are still here working towards the mission.”

Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015 and stepped down from its board in 2018, four years after saying that AI is “potentially more dangerous than nukes.”

Musk is now suing Microsoft-backed OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman, among others, alleging they abandoned the company’s founding mission to develop artificial intelligence “for the benefit of humanity broadly.”

Since releasing the ChatGPT chatbot to the public in late 2022, OpenAI has become one of the hottest startups on the planet, with a valuation reportedly over $80 billion. The company’s convoluted “capped-profit” structure resulted in Altman being briefly ousted by the board late last year, before an uproar among investors and employees led to his quick reinstatement.

Musk has long wanted recognition for his central role in the creation of OpenAI, and he spent large chunks of the lawsuit telling his version of events. His lawyers said in the suit that Musk was approached in 2015 by Altman and OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman and agreed to form a nonprofit lab that would develop artificial general intelligence, or AGI, outside of the corporate sphere.

Musk’s attorneys said their client contributed over $15 million to OpenAI in 2016, which was “more than any other donor” and helped the startup build a team of “top talent.” The next year, Musk gave nearly $20 million to OpenAI, which the attorneys reiterated was more than other backers. In total, Musk invested over $44 million into OpenAI from 2016 through September 2020, according to the suit.

Additionally, Musk leased OpenAI’s initial office space “and paid the monthly rental expenses,” the suit said. He was also “present for important company milestones.”

Kwon didn’t dispute Musk’s central role in the early days of OpenAI, but he added some other details. For example, Kwon wrote that Musk at one point indicated he needed “full initial control and majority equity” and later suggested that OpenAI merge with Tesla.

“We did not think either approach was right for the mission,” Kwon wrote.

In the memo, Altman called Musk a hero of his and said the he misses the old version of his co-founder. But he said the company’s mission continues.

While it’s the first time the dispute between the two sides has resulted in a fiery lawsuit, they’ve been at odds for a while.

Before he split with OpenAI, Tesla hired co-founder Andrej Karpathy as senior director of AI. Karpathy returned to OpenAI in 2023. And Musk has been notably vocal in his opposition to OpenAI and its Microsoft partnership in recent years, stating publicly in November that OpenAI had deviated from its original mission.

“OpenAI should be renamed ‘super closed source for maximum profit AI,’ because this is what it actually is,” Musk said onstage at The New York Times’ DealBook conference. Regarding OpenAI’s transformation from an “open source foundation” to a multibillion-dollar for-profit company, Musk said, “I don’t know, is this legal?”

Kwon insisted on Friday that OpenAI is independent and continues to work “to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity.”

Musk’s lawyers didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

— CNBC’s Lora Kolodny and Hayden Field contributed to this report

WATCH: Elon Musk lawsuit against OpenAI and Altman began a year ago

Elon Musk is suing Microsoft-backed OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, among others, alleging they abandoned the company’s founding mission to develop artificial intelligence “for the benefit of humanity broadly.”

In a lawsuit filed Thursday with a San Francisco court, Musk’s lawyers said the tech billionaire was approached in 2015 by Altman and OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman and agreed to form a nonprofit lab that would develop artificial general intelligence for the “benefit of humanity.”

A co-founder of OpenAI in 2015, Musk stepped down from the firm’s board in 2018, four years after saying that AI is “potentially more dangerous than nukes.”

“To this day, OpenAI, Inc.’s website continues to profess that its charter is to ensure that AGI benefits all of humanity.’ In reality, however, OpenAI, Inc. has been transformed into a closed-source de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company in the world: Microsoft,” the lawsuit filing said.

Musk’s lawyers said in the lawsuit that OpenAI’s focus on maximizing profits for Microsoft breaks that agreement.

“Under its new Board, it is not just developing but is actually refining an AGI to maximize profits for Microsoft, rather than for the benefit of humanity,” the filing said.

OpenAI and Microsoft were not immediately available for comment.

Musk’s lawyers said the suit was submitted “to compel OpenAI to adhere to the Founding Agreement and return to its mission to develop AGI for the benefit of humanity, not to personally benefit the individual Defendants and the largest technology company in the world.”

Microsoft, which is facing scrutiny from EU antitrust regulators over its reported $13 billion investment in OpenAI, recently announced a new partnership with French start-up Mistral AI.

The U.S. tech giant said on Monday that it was investing in the company, which is regarded as Europe’s answer to OpenAI, to help it unlock “new commercial opportunities” and expand to global markets.

The legal action pits two of the world’s most prominent tech leaders against each other at a time of extraordinary hype over the future of AI.

Since debuting in November 2022, OpenAI’s chatbot, ChatGPT, has taken the world by storm. The AI tool quickly became the fastest-growing consumer application in history and kick-started the launch of rival chatbots from companies such as Google parent Alphabet and Microsoft.

Both Musk and Altman have been making headlines. Musk, considered the world’s richest person, runs electrical vehicle maker Tesla, rocket and satellite maker SpaceX, and bought X for $44 billion in October 2022. He recently reported the advances of the brain chip technology implants produced by his startup Neuralink.

Altman has meanwhile had a rocky relationship with OpenAI. He was suddenly fired from the company in November of last year, in a move that sent shock waves across the tech industry. The American entrepreneur — one of the leading figures in the AI boom — returned to the firm a few days later.

Elon Musk said Chinese electric automakers will find “significant” success outside of China, even as his firm Tesla faces intense competition from these same companies.

“The Chinese car companies are the most competitive car companies in the world. So, I think they will have significant success outside of China depending on what kind of tariffs or trade barriers are established,” Musk said on Tesla’s earnings call on Wednesday.

“Frankly, I think, if there are not trade barriers established, they will pretty much demolish most other companies in the world.”

It’s not the first time Musk has heaped praise on Chinese EV makers. Last year, the billionaire called Chinese EV firms “the most competitive in the world” and said they are likely to be among the world’s top auto companies.

“If I were to guess … probably some company out of China is the most likely to be second to Tesla,” Musk said.

Tesla’s own shares slid in pre-market trade on Thursday, after the company posted earnings that missed expectations and warned of a slowdown in 2024.

The world’s five richest men have more than doubled their vast wealth since 2020, according to an Oxfam report, as the charity calls for curbs on “corporate power.”

The report found that the combined fortune of the world’s wealthiest people — Tesla CEO Elon Musk, LVMH boss Bernard Arnault and family, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Oracle founder Larry Ellison, and veteran investor Warren Buffett — has jumped from $405 billion in March 2020 to $869 billion in November 2023. Oxfam used data from Forbes and Wealth X which has not been independently verified by CNBC.

Oxfam’s report was published Monday to coincide with the start of the latest World Economic Forum Annual Meeting, which sees the so-called global elite of top business and political leaders meet in Davos, Switzerland, although the five billionaires named in the report are not due to attend.

Seven of the world’s ten biggest companies have a billionaire as their CEO or main shareholder, the report found. Meanwhile, the world’s richest 1% of people own 43% of global financial assets, according to the research, such as publicly listed instruments like stocks and bonds, along with stakes in privately-held businesses.

“If current trends continue, the world will have its first trillionaire within a decade but poverty won’t be eradicated for another 229 years,” Oxfam said.

The charity also highlighted that net profit among 148 of the world’s biggest companies jumped 52% in the year to June 2023, versus their average profits between 2018 and 2021.

“Extreme poverty in the poorest countries is still higher than it was pre-pandemic, yet a small number of super-rich men are racing to become the world’s first trillionaire within the next ten years,” Aleema Shivji, Oxfam’s interim chief executive, said.

The charity called on governments to reduce the gap between the ultra-rich and the rest of society by “reining in corporate power,” including by breaking up monopolies, capping CEO pay and adding new taxes on permanent wealth and excess profits.

CNBC attempted to approach the individuals named for comment.

OpenAI’s board of directors said Friday that Sam Altman will step down as CEO and will be replaced on an interim basis by technology chief Mira Murati.

The company said it conducted “a deliberative review process” and “concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities.”

“The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI,” the statement said.

OpenAI’s board includes chief scientist Ilya Sutskever and independent directors such as Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo, technology entrepreneur Tasha McCauley, and Helen Toner of the Georgetown Center for Security and Emerging Technology. OpenAI says the board of its 501(c)(3) is the “overall governing body for all OpenAI activities.”

The board also said that Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president, “will be stepping down as chairman of the board and will remain in his role at the company, reporting to the CEO.”

Sam Altman acknowledged that he was leaving OpenAI in a post on X on Friday, but did not mention any accusations by the firm’s board that he failed to be candid during unspecified reviews. He said he loved working at the company and that he would talk more about “what’s next later.”

Regarding the appointment of Murati, OpenAI said, “As the leader of the company’s research, product, and safety functions, Mira is exceptionally qualified to step into the role of interim CEO. We have the utmost confidence in her ability to lead OpenAI during this transition period.”

OpenAI, which has raised billions of dollars from Microsoft and ranked first on CNBC’s Disruptor 50 list this year, jumped into the mainstream in late 2022 after releasing its AI chatbot ChatGPT to the public. The service went viral by allowing users to convert simple text into creative conversation and has pushed big tech companies such as Alphabet and Meta to step up their investments in generative AI.

Microsoft shares slipped after the announcement, closing the day down 1.7% at $369.84.

A Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement that the company has “a long-term partnership with OpenAI and Microsoft remains committed to Mira and their team as we bring this next era of AI to our customers.”

In a post on X, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella commented about his company’s “long-term agreement with OpenAI,” explaining that it would “remain committed to our partnership, and to Mira and the team.” Nadella did not address Altman’s departure.

Brockman also shared a post on X that included the message he sent to his former OpenAI colleagues, informing them that he “quit” after he learned about “today’s news.”

Later in the evening, Brockman said in an X post that both he and Altman were “shocked and saddened by what the board did today.”

Sutskever instigated a virtual meeting with Altman that the rest of the OpenAI board attended except Brockman, the now-former OpenAI president claimed in the X post. It was during this meeting that Sutskever allegedly fired Altman, telling him “that the news was going out very soon,” Brockman wrote.

Less than half-an-hour later, Brockman claimed to have received a text message from Sutskever, in which the chief scientist summoned for another virtual meeting. At this meeting, Brockman said he learned of Altman’s firing and that he was being removed from OpenAI’s board, but was assured to be “vital to the company and would retain his role.”

“As far as we know, the management team was made aware of this shortly after, other than Mira who found out the night prior,” Brockman said in the post, which was quickly followed by a separate message from Altman.

Altman said in an X post that “today was a weird experience in many ways. but one unexpected one is that it has been sorta like reading your own eulogy while you’re still alive.”

“if i start going off, the openai board should go after me for the full value of my shares,” Altman said in another X post.

OpenAI debuted in 2015 as a nonprofit and employed Sutskever as research director and Brockman as chief technology officer. The firm’s original investors included several prominent Silicon Valley luminaries like Altman, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who reportedly committed $1 billion to the project.

Before taking over as CEO, Altman, 38, was president of startup accelerator Y Combinator and gained prominence in Silicon Valley as an early-stage investor. Earlier in his career, he started the social networking company Loopt.

As OpenAI’s popularity grew this year alongside ChatGPT, so too did Altman’s profile. He became an ambassador of sorts, representing the ballooning AI industry across the globe.

In September, Indonesia awarded Altman the so-called “Golden Visa,” providing him with 10 years worth of various travel accommodations and perks intended to help the country gain more foreign investors.

Altman visited several Asia-Pacific countries over the summer including Singapore, India, China, South Korea and Japan, meeting with government leaders and officials and giving public speeches on the rise of AI and the need for regulations.

The technologist testified before the U.S. Senate in May, calling on lawmakers to regulate AI, citing the technology’s potential to have a negative impact on the job market, the information ecosystem, and other societal and economic concerns.

“I think if this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong,” Altman said at the time. “And we want to be vocal about that. We want to work with the government to prevent that from happening.”

In a prelude to his Senate testimony, Altman also spoke at a dinner with roughly 60 lawmakers, who were reportedly wowed by his speech and demonstrations.

“It’s not easy to keep members of Congress rapt for close to two hours,” said Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., vice chair of the House Democratic Caucus, who co-hosted the dinner with GOP Conference Vice Chair Mike Johnson, R-La., now House speaker. “So Sam Altman was very informative and provided a lot of information.”

More recently, Altman spoke this week at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation conference in San Francisco, along with various technology executives and world leaders including U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping.

OpenAI held its first developer conference in early November, underscoring the startup’s rising popularity in the technology industry. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella made a surprise guest appearance during the event, joining Altman on stage to discuss the startup’s AI technologies and its partnership with Microsoft.

Altman didn’t immediately respond to a request for more information.

— CNBC’s Lora Kolodny contributed to this report.

WATCH: OpenAI says Altman exiting as CEO

X, the social media service formerly known as Twitter, will launch two new tiers of subscriptions for users, its owner Elon Musk said on Friday.

One tier will be “lower cost with all features, but no reduction in ads,” while the other is “more expensive, but has no ads,” Musk said.

This week, X announced it will begin a test that charges users $1 per year in New Zealand and the Philippines in order to “post & interact with other posts.” X said it is part of a program designed to fight spam and bot activity. Those who opt out will only be able to read posts.

It’s unclear if the $1 annual subscription is one of the two new subscription tiers that Musk is referencing.

The social media company already has a $8 per month subscription service called X Premium. Users who signed up to this can get the blue checkmark on their account as well as other features, such as the ability to edit a post.

Since taking over Twitter in October 2022 and rebranding to X, Musk has made sweeping changes, including making cuts to trust and safety teams and removing the blue checkmark from non-paying accounts. The blue checkmark helped users identify authentic accounts belonging to public figures. Musk has also reinstated previously banned accounts on the platform.

Those changes have scared off advertisers. In July, Musk said X’s cash flow remains negative because of a nearly 50% drop in advertising revenue coupled with “heavy debt.”

New subscriptions could be a bid to improve the company’s finances and open new revenue streams.

X is facing challenges from less mature players such as Meta’s Threads and Bluesky.