Billionaire Twitter owner Elon Musk is ringing the alarm bells again about the dangers of artificial intelligence to humanity – and claims that a popular chatbot has a liberal bias which it plans to counter with its own creation of AI.
Musk said Fox News host Tucker Carlson in a segment aired Monday night that he plans to create an alternative to the popular ChatGPT AI chatbot he calls “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 was concerned that ChatGPT “is formed to be politically correct.”
In the first of a two-part interview with Carlson, Musk also made the case for the artificial intelligence regulation, saying he is a “huge fan”. He called AI “more dangerous” than cars or rockets and said it had the potential to destroy humanity.
Separately, Musk incorporated a new company called X.AI Corp, according to a Nevada business filing. The Nevada Secretary of State’s office website says the company was established on March 9 and lists Musk as a director and his longtime adviser, Jared Birchall, as secretary.
Musk has for many years expressed strong opinions about artificial intelligence and dismissed other tech leaders, including Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates, for having what he described as a “limited” understanding of the field.
Musk was an early investor in OpenAI — the startup behind ChatGPT — and co-chaired its board when it was founded in 2015 as a nonprofit AI research lab. But Musk only lasted a few years there, stepping down from the board in early 2018 in a move the San Francisco startup has linked to Tesla’s work building automated driving systems. “As You’re here continues to focus more 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 non-profit association.
Musk explained his departure in 2019, saying it was also related to his need to focus on engineering issues at Tesla and some differences of opinion with OpenAI executives. It was “just better to part ways on good terms,” he said.
“Tesla was competing for some of the same people as OpenAI and I disagreed with some of what the OpenAI team wanted to do,” Musk tweeted, without elaborating.
But there have been questions about the quality of Tesla’s AI systems. US security regulators last month announced a investigation in a fatal crash involving a Tesla suspected of using an automated driving system when it hit a parked fire truck in California.
The fire truck probe is part of a larger agency-led investigation into several cases of Teslas using the automaker’s Autopilot system crashing into parked emergency vehicles that tend to others accidents. NHTSA has become more aggressive in pursuing safety issues with Teslas over the past year, announcing multiple recalls and investigations.
In the year since Musk’s resignation from the board, OpenAI was still a long way from working on ChatGPT, but publicly unveiled the first generation of its GPT system, on which ChatGPT is based, and started a major change. to integrate as a for-profit business. .
In 2020, Musk tweeted that “OpenAI should be more open” while noting that he had “no control and only very limited insight” on this.
Sometimes it was complementary. In the days after ChatGPT was released on Nov. 30, Musk tweeted to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman that it was “scary” and complained that the media didn’t cover it extensively because “ChatGPT is not a cause of the far left”.
Since then, however, Musk has repeatedly pointed to examples he believes show leftist bias or censorship. Like other chatbots, ChatGPT has filters that attempt to prevent it from spouting toxic or offensive responses.