Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk has announced the launch of a new artificial intelligence (AI) platform, TruthGPT, as a challenge to the current offerings from Microsoft and Google. Musk criticized Microsoft-backed OpenAI, the company behind popular chatbot sensation ChatGPT, of “training the AI to lie” and also said that OpenAI has become a “closed source,” “for-profit” organization that is “closely allied with Microsoft.” He accused Larry Page, co-founder of Google, of not properly taking AI safety issues into consideration.
In a recent interview on Fox News Channel, Musk discussed the launch of TruthGPT, stating that it would be a “maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe.” He believes that such an AI platform would be less likely to wipe out humankind as it views us an interesting part of the universe. His comments were met with no response from Musk, OpenAI, or Page.
Positioning himself as an AI rival to Microsoft and Google, Musk has been seen poaching AI researchers from Alphabet Inc’s Google to start up a new AI entity. He also founded X.AI Corp in Nevada, with himself as the sole director, and Jared Birchall, the managing director of Musk’s family office, as a secretary.
Musk has previously voiced his worries about the potential risks that come with AI development, and urged for a six-month pause on developing systems more powerful than OpenAI’s GPT-4. During his interview, he warned about the dangers of an AI that was “more dangerous than mismanaged aircraft design or production maintenance or bad car production”, and mentioned the (ominous) potential for “civilizational destruction.”
Just last year, Musk took on a CEO role for Twitter – a social media platform which he acquired for $44 billion. In his talk with Tucker Carlson, he revealed that he now values Twitter at “less than half” of the acquisition price. Additionally, back when he was president, Elon Musk said he had a meeting with Barack Obama, during which he advised on the need to regulate AI by the federal government.
OpenAI is a nonprofit research lab based in San Francisco and co-founded by Elon Musk and Sam Altman in 2015. It is focused on pursuing the collision of human and artificial intelligence, and has launched various commercial products such as GPT-3, a natural language processing system. In January 2021, Microsoft announced additional multi-billion dollar investments into OpenAI, marking a battle between the two tech giants for AI resources and funds.
Elon Musk is an influential entrepreneur, inventor, and CEO of both the automaker Tesla, Inc. and aerospace manufacturer SpaceX. Born in South Africa, Mr. Musk made his way to the United States to study physics, business and economics at the University of Pennsylvania. Driven by his ambitious visions and disruptive innovation, he made his first fortune in the early 2000s from the sale of his online payment platform, PayPal. He then went on to develop his other two corporations, Tesla and SpaceX, and eventually secured his place as one of the richest people in the world. Although he is known for his high-risk endeavors, he has garnered worldwide recognition for pushing technology and innovation forward.
