- Elon Musk says OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, isn’t what he envisioned when he co-founded it.
- Musk told Fox News that he “took [his] Eye off the ball,” and that led OpenAI to move away from its open-source, non-profit beginnings.
- Musk has repeatedly criticized OpenAI since leaving its board in 2018. He now says he wants to build a ChatGPT rival, “TruthGPT.”
Elon Musk says OpenAI isn’t what he wanted it to be, and that’s partly his fault.
Musk co-founded OpenAIthe creator of ChatGPTin 2015 but left its board in 2018. In an interview Monday night on Fox News Channel’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” he said OpenAI had failed to live up to his expectations.
“I really put a lot of effort into creating this organization to act as a counterweight to Google,” he said. “And then I kind of took my focus off the ball, I guess, and they’re now closed source and they’re obviously for-profit and they’re closely allied with Microsoft. Indeed Microsoft has a say very strong, if not directly controlling, OpenAI at this point.”
Microsoft has enlisted OpenAI to build its new AI-powered version Bing search engine. In March 2019, OpenAI announcement a shift to a “capped profit” model as a hybrid of a not-for-profit and for-profit enterprise.
In an interview with The edge Last month, Ilya Sutskever, one of OpenAI’s co-founders and chief scientist, discussed OpenAI’s change in approach over the years to sharing information about its AI language models.
“If you believe, like us, that at some point, AI – AgI – is going to be extremely, incredibly powerful, so it just doesn’t make sense to open source,” he said. “I expect that in a few years it will become completely obvious for everyone that open source AI just isn’t wise.” (AGI, artificial general intelligence, refers to machines that could theoretically learn everything humans could, as opposed to just performing a task. )
The musk has criticized OpenAI in the past too. In February, he said OpenAI was “not what I wanted at all,” call him a “closed-source, maximum-profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft”.
OpenAI said Musk left the board in 2018 to avoid a potential conflict of interest with Tesla’s work on self-driving cars. musk later said another factor in his departure was the fact that he “didn’t agree with some of what the OpenAI team wanted to do”.
Musk said elsewhere in Monday’s interview that his disagreements with Google co-founder Larry Page over AI security are “the reason OpenAI exists” in the first place, and that those discussions made him want to make OpenAI “the furthest thing from Google”. The CEO of Tesla and Twitter said he was now plans to create “TruthGPT”, which he described as a “maximum-truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe”.