Billionaire Twitter owner Elon Musk is again sounding warning bells on the dangers of artificial intelligence to humanity — and claiming that a popular chatbot has a liberal bias that he plans to counter with his own AI creation.
Musk told Fox News host Tucker Carlson in a segment aired Monday night that he plans to create an alternative to the popular AI chatbot ChatGPT that he is calling “TruthGPT,” which will be a “maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe.”
The idea, Musk said, is that an AI that wants to understand humanity is less likely to destroy it.Musk also said he’s worried that ChatGPT “is being trained to be politically correct.”
In the first of a two-part interview with Carlson, Musk also advocated for the regulation of artificial intelligence, saying he’s a “big fan.” He called AI “more dangerous” than cars or rockets and said it has the potential to destroy humanity.
Separately, Musk has incorporated a new business called X.AI Corp, according to a Nevada business filing. The website of the Nevada secretary of state’s office says the business was formed on March 9 and lists Musk as its director and his longtime adviser, Jared Birchall, as secretary.
Musk has for many years expressed strong opinions about artificial intelligence and has dismissed other tech leaders, including Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates, for having what he has described as a “limited” understanding of the field.Musk was an early investor in OpenAI — the startup behind ChatGPT — and co-chaired its board upon its 2015 founding as a nonprofit AI research lab. But Musk only lasted there for a few years, resigning from the board in early 2018 in a move that the San Francisco startup tied to Tesla’s work on building automated driving systems. “As Tesla continues to become more focused on AI, this will eliminate a potential future conflict for Elon,” OpenAI said in a February 2018 blog post.
“I came up with the name and the concept,” Musk told Carlson, lamenting that OpenAI is now closely allied with Microsoft and is no longer a nonprofit.
Musk elaborated on his departure in 2019, saying it was also related to his need to focus on engineering problems at Tesla and some differences of opinion with OpenAI’s leaders. It was “just better to part ways on good terms,” he said.
“Tesla was competing for some of the same people as OpenAI & I didn’t agree with some of what OpenAI team wanted to do,” Musk tweeted, without specifying.
But there have been questions surrounding the quality of Tesla’s AI systems. US safety regulators last month announced an investigation into a fatal crash involving a Tesla suspected of using an automated driving system when it ran into a parked firetruck in California.
