Elon Musk, the controversial CEO of Tesla and Twitter, recently announced that he plans to enter the artificial intelligence chatbot arena by creating his own version of the popular ChatGPT software from OpenAI. In an interview with Tucker Carlson, Musk stated that his new bot—dubbed “TruthGPT”—would be built to be “maximum truth seeking,” and “aim to understand the nature of the universe.” Musk initially became interested in AI and ChatGPT after a number of dinners with leading AI developers in the Bay Area, and further claimed credit for coming up with the concept and name “ChatGPT”.
OpenAI is a company founded in 2015 by Musk and other high-profile early funders, of which Ilya Sutskever was considered one of the co-founders. Musk said if not for his recruitment of Ilya, the organization would not have succeeded. Since Musk left in 2018, the company has been closed-source and is now closely aligned with Microsoft. With Google’s DeepMind company also heavily involved in this field, it appears that Musk believes there is a need for “a third option”—one that his own creation will deliver.
In the same interview, Elon Musk brought attention to a potential danger of artificial intelligence by expressing worry about its use for “political correctness”. He said he is “particularly concerned about the fact that it is being trained to be politically correct, which is simply another way of saying untruthful things.” As such, his new software will attempt to prevent this potential misuse of AI power.
Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is a firm believer of the potential for the technology to disrupt the status quo and lead to a better world. His latest venture invites further questions of Musk’s ambitions beyond Twitter, Tesla, and SpaceX. In addition to his pledge to protect users against this mischievous use of AI technology, Musk has also recently proposed a six-month moratorium on the development of new AI systems due to safety concerns, as they “have the potential of civilizational destruction”.
OpenAI is a San Francisco-based company co-founded by Elon Musk, Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, Jeff Dean, and other well-known investors. The company’s mission is to develop a “safe, trustable, and reliable” artificial intelligence system to combat intelligence threats and for general use. OpenAI’s most notable work is the ChatGPT software which is an AI-based chatbot that responds to natural language texts and is used heavily by corporations and professional communities.
Ilya Sutskever is a Russian-American computer scientist and one the founders of OpenAI. Sutskever began his career at Google in 2011, where he and Geoffrey Hinton developed a neural-network-based speech recognition system that revolutionized Google’s products. He then went on to found and lead the Google Brain project and subsequently became the Research Director of OpenAI, where he supervised the development of ChatGPT. Sutskever is widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in artificial intelligence research today.
