Billionaire Elon Musk has revealed plans to develop an artificial intelligence (AI) platform named ‘TruthGPT’, a day after he expressed his concerns about Microsoft-backed OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Speaking on Fox News Channel on Monday, Musk fiercely criticized OpenAI for now training AI to lie and for its “closed source,” “for-profit” approach to the enterprise. He also expressed his disbelief that co-founder of Google Larry Page was not taking AI safety seriously. According to Musk, TruthGPT is a maximum truth-seeking AI that attempts to understand the complexities of the universe. Musk believes that a machine which has a desire to understand the universe, has a significantly lower risk of annihilating humanity as, according to him, “it is an interesting part of the universe”.
In order to move forward with his projects, the entrepreneur has been poaching AI researchers from Alphabet Inc’s Google, to compete with OpenAI. His efforts seem to be paying off as he recently incorporated X.AI Corp. in Nevada with himself listed as the sole director. In addition, Jared Birchall, the managing director of Musk’s family office, is listed as the secretary.
The escalating concern about the security in Artificial Intelligence has led Musk to call for a six-month halt on further development of stronger AI systems than OpenAI’s recently released GPT-4. In his interview with Carlson, Musk suggested that AI is much more dangerous than mismanaged airplane design, production maintenance or bad automobile production and was even quoted saying “it has the potential of civilizational destruction”. With his tweet suggesting that he hinted at potential regulation of AI to the former US President Barack Obama when they met, it is clear that Musk takes the risks of AI seriously.
In addition to his various AI challenges, Musk is also the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX as well as the CEO of Twitter, a social media platform he bought for a whopping $44 billion last year. During his interview, Musk revealed that he currently values Twitter at less than half of its purchase price.
The article also mentions OpenAI, which is a research laboratory owned by Microsoft Corp. OpenAI was founded in 2015 and Musk was on their board until 2018. OpenAI develops various AI technologies and works on advancing digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole. Microsoft has been making substantial investments in OpenAI, in a possible attempt to stay competitive with Google in the AI market.
The article also keeps referring to Larry Page, who is presently Executive Chairman of Google’s parent company Alphabet Inc. Page co-founded Google with Sergey Brin in 1998 and served as the CEO of Google until 2001. In an effort to move away from his executive obligations, he shifted from the role of CEO to the role of President, Products in April 2011 and currently serves as the Executive Chairman of Alphabet Inc, the parent company of Google. As one of the pioneers in Artificial Intelligence, Page has been instrumental in developing various AI-based technologies, ranging from image recognition to natural language processing.
