On Tuesday, tech entrepreneur Elon Musk spoke in an interview with Fox News’ Tucker Carlson about his latest project – the creation of a chatbot entitled TruthGPT, a “maximum truth-seeking AI”. According to the Tesla CEO, this clever piece of automation could provide a viable alternative to OpenAI and Google in the quest to create more positive outcomes than harms.
Elon’s main purpose for developing this AI is to better understand the nature of the universe and prevent it from destroying humanity as an “interesting part of it”. Despite being involved in the start-up of OpenAI, which serves as an open-source, non-profit AI research firm, Musk is not fully satisfied with the manner in which the project is progressing. He publically condemned the organization for training AI models to be politically correct and encouraged people to look into his own endeavor – TruthGPT.
In the same year that marked the beginning of TruthGPT, 2018, tension between Musk, OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman and other creators arose, leading Elon to ultimately depart from the project. His opinion on the dangers of powerful AI shifted in March 2021 when he signed a letter along with Steve Wozniak and Tristan Harris of the Center for Humane technology. This letter alerted the public about the need to take a pause in the training of more powerful models than GPT-4 for at least six months.
Also this week, The Financial Times reported that Musk is in the process of working on an OpenAI rival. Consequently, he has hired the ex-DeepMind employee, Igor Babuschkin, to be responsible for this task. Although it remains uncertain whether TruthGPT’s ultimate purpose is to become a larger, language-based model that is able to compete with Google and OpenAI, there is still hope that Elon Musk’s ambitions and ideas may be successful in pushing progress in areas like fairness in AI training.
OpenAI is a renowned American research institution that focuses on Artificial Intelligence (AI). It was founded in 2015 by several entrepreneurs from the tech industry, including Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman and Greg Brockman, as an open source. The main goal of OpenAI is to develop AI technology that can be used for humanity’s benefit. OpenAI has accomplished many milestones such as developing the GPT-3 language model, and has even been acquired by Microsoft.
Elon Musk is an undisputed visionary and a grand entrepreneur who has changed the world with his groundbreaking ideas. He is the founder of PayPal, Tesla, Tesla Solar, DeepMind and SpaceX. He is a strong advocate of sustainable energy, clean access to fuel as well as artificial intelligence (AI) usage in everyday life. As of April 2021, Musk has become the world’s second-richest man with a net worth of over $180 billion. His companies continue to prosper and provide solutions to society.
