Elon Musk, the billionaire tech mogul, has announced his intention to create an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot that is based on “maximum truth-seeking” – an idea he has labeled “TruthGPT”. The announcement came on Fox News’ “Tucker Carlson Tonight Program” on Monday, and news of the AI project follows Musk’s recent plea for governments to halt the development of AI that is more powerful than OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4.
This isn’t the first time Musk has ventured into the world of AI. He helped launch the nonprofit OpenAI in 2015, but stepped away from the board three years later. The organization recently transferred to a “capped-profit” status, receiving funds from outside investors and Microsoft, which helped to train the ChatGPT-4.
Musk expressed a valid concern over the issue of training AI to be “politically correct”; he also referred to ChatGPT and Google’s Bard, which are said to be able to ‘hallucinate’ answers to human input, meaning that the outputs can make sense but may lack accuracy. His words echo those expressed by many other tech leaders recently, including Mark Cuban and Apple co-founder, Steve Wozniak. Alphabet’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, also expressed his views on the subject, noting that some AI could be “potentially dangerous”.
The billionaire mogul has also recently made headlines with his Twitter announcement that he was working on a new company, named X.AI, and whilst little is known about his intentions, it is clear that Musk wishes to challenge the current dominating force in artificial intelligence, Google, with his TruthGPT.
The details of Musk’s plans for his AI chatbot remain unconfirmed, but the timing of the announcement is bringing further attention to the ever-growing debate surrounding AI’s potential to negatively affect us as a civilization. In the meantime, we can only guess at what Musk’s TruthGPT might offer in terms of usability, accuracy, and value to the AI industry – but one thing is for sure: Elon Musk does not do things by halves.
