Billionaire Elon Musk said he will launch an artificial intelligence (AI), which he calls “TruthGPT”, to challenge the offerings from Microsoft and Google.
He criticised Microsoft-backed OpenAI, the firm behind chatbot sensation ChatGPT, for “training the AI to lie” and said that OpenAI has now become a “closed source”, “for-profit” organisation “closely allied with Microsoft”.
He also accused Google co-founder Larry Page 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,” Mr Musk said in an interview with Fox News Channel’s anchor Tucker Carlson, which 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,” Mr Musk said.
Mr Musk, OpenAI, Microsoft and Mr Page did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for comment.
Mr Musk has been poaching AI researchers from Alphabet Inc’s Google to launch a start-up to rival OpenAI, people familiar with the matter told Reuters.
In March, Mr Musk registered a firm named X.AI Corp, incorporated in Nevada, according to a state filing.
The firm lists him as the sole director and Mr Jared Birchall, managing director of Mr Musk’s family office, as a secretary.
The move came even after Mr Musk and a group of AI experts and industry executives called for a six-month pause in developing systems more powerful than OpenAI’s newly launched GPT-4, citing potential risks to society.
Mr Musk also reiterated his warnings about AI during the interview with Mr Carlson, saying “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 civilisational destruction,” Mr Musk said.
He said, for example, that a super intelligent AI can write incredibly well and potentially manipulate public opinions.
He also tweeted at the weekend that he met former United States president Barack Obama when Mr Obama was in office and told him that Washington needed to “encourage AI regulation”.
Mr Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015, but 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 that “Tesla was competing for some of the same people as OpenAI and I didn’t agree with some of what (the) OpenAI team wanted to do”.
Mr Musk, who is chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX, is also CEO of social media platform Twitter, which he bought for US$44 billion (S$58.6 billion) in 2022.
In the interview with Fox News, he said he recently valued Twitter at “less than half” of the acquisition price.
In January, Microsoft Corp announced a further multibillion-dollar investment in OpenAI, intensifying competition with rival Google and fuelling the race to attract AI funding in Silicon Valley.
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