SAN FRANCISCO: Billionaire Elon Musk has said he will launch an alternative to the chatbot sensation ChatGPT that he calls “TruthGPT” which he said will be a “maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe.”
Musk said the idea is that an AI wanting to understand humanity would be less likely to destroy it.
He said TruthGPT “might be the best path to safety” that would be “unlikely to annihilate humans”.
“It is simply starting late. But I will try to create a third option,” Musk said.
He also lamented that ChatGPT was being trained “to be politically correct”.
In the first of a two-part interview with Fox News Channel’s Tucker Carlson, Musk also called for the regulation of artificial intelligence, saying he is a “big fan.” He said AI is “more dangerous” than cars or rockets and that it has the potential to destroy humanity.
He criticised Microsoft-backed OpenAI, the company behind popular chat service ChatGPT, of “training the AI to lie” saying that OpenAI has now become a “closed source”, “for-profit” firm “closely allied with Microsoft”.
He also accused Google’s co-founder Larry Page, of not taking AI safety seriously.
Recently, Musk and a group of AI experts and industry executives called for a six-month halt in developing systems more powerful than the newly launched GPT-4, citing potential risks to society.
Musk’s interest in AI
Musk has for many years expressed strong opinions about AI and has dismissed other renowned figures in tech, including Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates, for having a “limited” understanding of the field.
The CEO of Twitter and SpaceX was an early investor in OpenAI – the firm behind ChatGPT – and co-chaired its board upon its founding in 2015 as a nonprofit AI research lab. But he only stayed there for a few years and resigned from the board in early 2018 in a move that the San Francisco startup linked to Tesla’s work on building automated driving systems.
