Business magnate Elon Musk announced on Monday he will launch an artificial intelligence (AI) platform that he calls “TruthGPT” to challenge the offerings from Microsoft (MSFT.O) and Google (GOOGL.O).
He denounced Microsoft-backed OpenAI, the firm behind chatbot sensation ChatGPT, of “training the AI to lie” and said OpenAI has now become a “closed source”, “for-profit” organization “closely allied with Microsoft”.
He also accused Larry Page, co-founder of Google, of not taking AI safety seriously.
“I’m going to start something which I call ‘TruthGPT’, or a maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe,” Musk said in an interview with Fox News Channel’s Tucker Carlson aired on Monday.
He said TruthGPT “might be the best path to safety” that would be “unlikely to annihilate humans”.
“It’s simply starting late. But I will try to create a third option,” Musk said.
Musk has been poaching AI researchers from Alphabet Inc’s (GOOGL.O) Google to launch a startup to rival OpenAI, people familiar with the matter told Reuters.
According to a state document, Musk created a company called X.AI Corp in Nevada last month. Musk was designated as the sole director, with Jared Birchall, the managing director of Musk’s family office, serving as secretary.
The move comes despite Musk and a group of artificial intelligence researchers and industry leaders calling for a six-month moratorium on developing systems more powerful than OpenAI’s recently debuted GPT-4, citing potential societal hazards.
During the discussion with Carlson, Musk again restated his worries about AI, claiming that “AI is more dangerous than, say, mismanaged aircraft design or production maintenance or bad car production,” according to the excerpts.
“It has the potential of civilizational destruction,” he said.
He said, for example, that a super-intelligent AI can write incredibly well and potentially manipulate public opinions.
He tweeted over the weekend that he had met with former U.S. President Barack Obama when he was president and told him that Washington needed to “encourage AI regulation”.
Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015, but he stepped down from the company’s board in 2018. In 2019, he tweeted that he left OpenAI because he had to focus on Tesla and SpaceX.
He also tweeted at that time that other reasons for his departure from OpenAI were, “Tesla was competing for some of the same people as OpenAI & I didn’t agree with some of what OpenAI team wanted to do.”
I had to focus on solving a painfully large number of engineering & manufacturing problems at Tesla (especially) & SpaceX
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 17, 2019
Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, has also become CEO of Twitter, a social media platform he bought for $44 billion last year.
In the interview with Fox News, Musk said he recently valued Twitter at “less than half” of the acquisition price.
In January, Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) announced a further multi-billion dollar investment in OpenAI, intensifying competition with rival Google and fueling the race to attract AI funding in Silicon Valley.
