Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla and SpaceX and CEO of Twitter, has reiterated his call for a “truth-seeking AI” to counter Microsoft’s Open AI’s ChatGPT. In an interview with Fox News Channel, he highlighted the need for such an AI platform and said he will launch his own initiative called ‘TruthGPT’ to address the issue.
Musk criticised Open AI for becoming a “closed source” and “for-profit” organisation closely allied with Microsoft. He also highlighted the need for AI safety measures like TruthGPT as a means of avoiding a potential catastrophe. He stated that Larry Page, Google’s co-founder, is not taking the safety measures of AI seriously enough.
Notably, earlier in February, Musk had tweeted “What we need is Truth-GPT”. In that tweet, it is speculated that he was already working on such an AI platform. Now, it seems that his plans are coming to fruition. It is also speculated that he is poaching AI researchers from Google for this project.
OpenAI is a research lab established in 2015 to advance the development of artificial intelligence (AI). It was co-founded by Musk and several other people from industry and the research community. However, after disagreeing over the long-term objectives of the organisation, he stepped down from the board in 2018. He has also since confirmed that he left because he had to focus on Tesla and SpaceX.
This is not the first time Musk has spoken about the need for a truth-seeking AI. He has previously called for a six-month pause in developing AI systems that are more powerful than OpenAI’s GPT-4, as they could potentially pose a risk to society.
Now, Musk has requested Barack Obama, the former US president whom he met during his presidency, to encourage the regulation of AI. He has been advocating the need for a TruthGPT AI platform to protect humanity from potential catastrophic civilizational destruction.
TruthGPT would be embedded with a purpose to understand the nature of the universe and would aspire to provide safety rather than having the potential to annihilate human life.
Whether his initiative will help protect humanity from AI-based calamities or not remains to be seen. However, one thing is certain – Musk is not one to shy away from championing the cause of the responsibly-created and monitored AI technology.
