Billionaire Elon Musk has announced plans to overcome Microsoft and Google’s AI initiatives with the launch of his own platform, called ‘TruthGPT’. The platform is meant to challenge the existing offerings from Microsoft and Google, and study the “nature of the universe”.
During an interview on Fox News, Musk mentioned that OpenAI, the development company created by the Microsoft-backed chatbot sensation ChatGPT have been “training the AI to lie” and have become a “for-profit”, “closed-source” organisation. He also criticized Google co-founder Larry Page of not taking Artificial Intelligence safety seriously.
In pursuit of setting up this platform, Musk has been poaching AI researchers from Google to launch a startup, to challenge OpenAI. He also formed X.AI Corp, incorporated in Nevada, with himself as the sole director and Jared Birchall, the managing director of Musk’s family office, as a secretary.
Elon Musk has already voiced his considerations towards the dangers of AI on a number of occasions. He even called for a moratorium of six months to halt the development of AI systems more powerful than OpenAI’s GPT-4, arguing potential risks to society. On the interview aired on Monday, he mentioned that AI can be “more dangerous than, say, mismanaged aircraft design or production maintenance or bad car production” and even go as far as civilizational destruction.
Elon Musk is a renowned entrepreneur and inventor, best known as the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX. He is also the owner of social media platform Twitter, which he bought for $44 billion last year. Microsoft’s recent multi-billion dollar investment in OpenAI has been seen as a move to compete with rival Google and fuel the budding race to attract AI funding in Silicon Valley.
In June of 2015, Elon Musk co-founded OpenAI, but stepped down from its board in 2018. Since then, he tweeted that he is focusing more on Tesla and SpaceX, and that he disagreed with some of the actions OpenAI team was taking. He also mentioned meeting with former U.S. President Barack Obama when he was president, to advocate for the regulation of AI.
Overall, it appears that Elon Musk is doing his best to further develop AI technology and improve the safety of its implementation. It remains to be seen what kind of an impact this new AI platform will have on the industry, but it has certainly been a timely move to counter Microsoft and Google’s AI initiatives.
