Key Takeaways:
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently teased a new social network from the ChatGPT-maker.
The proposal has sparked speculation that a platform like this could rival X (Twitter) as the crypto community’s preferred social hub.
Experts think OpenAI’s planned social app is a hard sell due in part to centralization issues, cultural challenges, and even operational costs.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently teased a new social network from the ChatGPT maker, sparking speculation whether such a platform could rival Elon Musk’s X as the crypto community’s preferred social hub.
According to media reports, OpenAI is already working on an app that is similar to X. The San Francisco-based startup reportedly built a prototype leveraging ChatGPT’s advanced image creation tools, with a social feed.
It’s not clear whether the app will be part of ChatGPT or standalone. The reports say OpenAI plans to use the data it manages from the social media feed, like live text and images, to train and refine its artificial intelligence (AI) models.
X has enjoyed success with its socially embedded AI chatbot, Grok, while Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, which plans to release a separate AI app to compete with ChatGPT, incorporates a Llama 3-powered chatbot into Facebook and WhatsApp.
OpenAI’s Decentralization Dilemma
But could OpenAI’s planned social network truly win over the crypto and Web3 communities, dethroning X to become the number one platform for cryptocurrency discourse, news, and meme culture?
Charu Sethi, principal ambassador of decentralized blockchain Polkadot, and president of NFT platform Unique Network, thinks it is a hard sell.
“Everything we have heard about OpenAI’s social network – an ‘X-like’ feed driven by generative AI – points to a centrally governed product,” she told Cryptonews, adding:
“Sam Altman’s own messages frame it as a strategic move to capture users and data, not a push for protocol-level openness. People want to own their identities and data, to move freely between services, and to know that no single firm can shut them down.”
Decentralization is a foundational issue in cryptocurrency. While X has become the go-to place for everything crypto, from meme wars to market-moving debates, the app has also faced criticism over its centralized architecture.
Jack Dorsey, who founded Twitter, now X, admitted that centralizing social media under corporations “really damaged the internet.”
He decried the centralization of Twitter, calling it his “biggest regret.” He preferred it to become a protocol instead of a company.
Eventually, Dorsey quit Twitter and backed Bluesky, a decentralized alternative. Together with other decentralized social media networks such as Lens, Mastodon, and Farcaster, Bluesky continues to chip away at X’s dominance.
For example, as X’s European audience fell 15% since Musk’s takeover, Bluesky reached 14 million sign-ups in November 2024, and Farcaster’s daily active users hit the tens of thousands a few months earlier.
But they remain comparably smaller than Threads or X itself, which boasts more than 600 million global monthly active users, according to Musk, who bought the platform from Dorsey in 2022 and renamed it ‘X’.
Still, decentralized networks are attracting passionate communities, particularly in cryptocurrency, where the ethos of user control and privacy is deeply rooted. As Sethi puts it, the platforms have one good thing going for them:
“[Decentralized platforms] trade explosive growth for user autonomy, and the market has proved there is real demand for that bargain.”
The Polkadot ambassador does not see OpenAI as a “decentralized ecosystem unless it pivots to on-chain identities or federated servers.”
Technical and Cultural Hurdles
ChatGPT reached 100 million users within just two months of its release, making it the fastest-growing consumer application in history, according to a January 2023 study by UBS.
Today, the generative AI chatbot, which can write articles, essays, jokes, and even poetry in response to prompts, is used by an average of 500 million people every week.
Analysts say ChatGPT’s runaway success testifies to OpenAI’s technical ability. However, building a successful social media network, even with ChatGPT’s massive user base, is no easy task.
“Twitter’s strength isn’t just the content or the clean UI [user interface], it’s the years of habit, history, and the network people built over time,” Charan Kumar, growth manager at social media agency Hype, tells Cryptonews.
“OpenAI doesn’t have that. No native graph, no real-time pulse.”
Kumar says one of the biggest challenges that OpenAI’s social app could face is fostering a sense of community and shared culture—something that even Bluesky and Threads have struggled to achieve at scale.
“The real drive isn’t just tech, it’s content, discovery, and shared culture. Bluesky and Threads had a bit of hype, sure, but they couldn’t build culture or spark real virality.”
Sethi, the Polkadot principal ambassador, outlined four major challenges she believes OpenAI might face in launching and scaling a social network:
Cold-start economics. Social graphs – webs of connections built over time – need density. Threads, for example, reached 320 million users by leveraging Instagram’s follow lists. “OpenAI has no equivalent,” said Sethi. ChatGPT’s 500 million weekly active users interact “in single-player mode,” not as a networked community. Bootstrapping a social graph will require “heavy recommendation seeding or paid influencer onboarding.”
Throughput and latency. Serving an AI-rich timeline means fusing vector-search retrieval (for real-time relevance) with generative capabilities (for summaries, alt-text, translations etc). That doubles inference cost vs. a plain feed. OpenAI’s ChatGPT already costs an estimated $100,000 a day to run; adding a social layer could spike GPU demand dramatically.
Monetization and financials: OpenAI’s services are costly and social platforms monetize more efficiently. Sethi says while starting a social app could offset AI losses, scaling ads without hurting user growth is complex.” Meta and X already have entrenched dominance in ad operations.
Differentiation: Social media behavior is different from ChatGPT usage. OpenAI’s social network needs to stand out. Without a unique value proposition, the planned app risks becoming just another Twitter clone.
Will ChatGPT Give OpenAI the Edge?
However, it is not all doom and gloom. The integration of ChatGPT and other advanced AI features could be OpenAI’s secret weapon.
Michael Sena, co-founder of agentic AI protocol Recall, says, “Integrating ChatGPT and other AI and agentic use cases into a social network would drive deeper engagement and amass even more data.”
Speaking to Cryptonews, Sena said this could give OpenAI an edge over X, which relies on Grok, the in-house AI chatbot from Musk. But there’s a catch. Sena warns, “As users, this is something we need to be wary of.”
That’s because of the privacy risks involved. As Charu Sethi cautioned:
“If OpenAI trains on all user posts, personal information could be inadvertently absorbed, raising the risk of the model regorging private data—a serious privacy breach.”
In this case, the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, “right to be forgotten” could become a technical challenge and derivative works created by AI could spark intellectual property disputes, she added.
Kumar, the Hype growth manager, sees another challenge:
“We’ve gotta figure out how to keep AI slop from flooding everything. Some kind of tagging or labeling needs to exist so you know what’s AI and what’s human.”
Sena remains upbeat about OpenAI’s prospects, if it can convert ChatGPT’s “users into users of its social app.” OpenAI would have a “strong chance” in competing with X, he says. A preferred choice for crypto proponents.
He spoke about how traditional social graphs, which have anchored the dominance of the likes of Meta and X, are a phenomenon in decline. Instead, platforms like TikTok have shifted to “AI-driven interest graphs.”
Interest graphs connect people based on shared interests rather than social ties, according to Sena. He said graphs are “becoming more dominant,” noting:
“Given OpenAI’s strengths in AI and personalization, it may be better positioned to build an interest-based network rather than a traditional social graph from scratch.”
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