Tesla CEO Elon Musk has an instrumental role in creating OpenAI,an artificial intelligence research lab, even before it existed. But recently, he regrets letting go of the chatbot, ChatGPT, which is one of the company’s popular AI platforms.
In his interview with CNBC, Elon Musk recalls how he named OpenAI and his involvement in locating key workers such as engineers and scientists for the company. His generous contributions to the company were shown when he funded it with a $1 billion investment. Unfortunately, later on, disagreements between Musk and OpenAI began to arise when he disapproved the company’s advancements. At one point, there were five founders of OpenAI including Sam Altman, Elon Musk, John Schulman, Wojciech Zaremba, Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever that established the company in December 2015, as reported by Decrypt.
The tech billionaire claims that Microsoft is the one controlling the ChatGPT maker, but Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella denied the idea. Because of this setback, Elon Musk wrote a letter to the company regarding AI development, even though he knew he couldn’t control how the company would proceed next. According to Fortune, Elon Musk felt that regret and guilt for stepping aside but prioritized AI safety.
Another prominent figure in the development of AI, Larry Page, a Google co-founder, wrote a different point of view regarding AI safety, which led to a not so friendly far between them and Elon Musk. DeepMind Technologies is a British AI research lab that Google purchased in 2014 for $500 million and this helped for the AI industry. Musk was initially hopeful about this acquisition but it turns out that it only made the obstacles harder to overcome since they are going against a giant. Elon Musk described it as an ant going against an elephant.
Overall, Elon Musk is concerned about the capabilities of AI, stating that it can be a double-edged sword which can both cause destruction or make the human race thrive. He puts emphasis on safe AI development and makes sure that the person in control of the digital super-intelligence remains secure.
