Elon Musk has lifted the veil of secrecy surrounding his reported future rival to the artificial intelligence-powered ChatGPT language tool launched last November by OpenAI. His own platform -Truth GPT - would challenge creations by Microsoft and Google, the tech billionaire said.
"I'm going to start something which I call Truth GPT or a maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe," Musk told the host of a US media outlet on 17 April.
The SpaceX and Tesla chief executive added that such AI “might be the best path to safety, in the sense that an AI that cares about understanding the universe... is unlikely to annihilate humans because we are an interesting part of the universe”.
“AI is more dangerous than, say, mismanaged aircraft design or production maintenance or bad car production. It has the potential - however small one may regard that probability, but it is non-trivial - it has the potential of civilizational destruction,” Musk said in another part of the interview, cited by media outlets.
Musk, who co-founded OpenAI in 2015 only to leave it in 2018 in the wake of a power tussle with its present chief executive, Sam Altman, positioned TruthGPT as a more transparent option. He appeared to imply that profit motives could, potentially, undermine the ethics of an AI model. OpenAI, the San-Francisco based start-up, was a non-profit company until 2020, when it switched gear and became a capped-profit company. According to Altman, the company learnt at the time, "that we were going to need far more capital than we were able to raise as a non-profit". He added: “Our non-profit is still fully in charge… there is a subsidiary capped profit so that our investors and employees can earn a certain fixed return."
Musk has already set up a new artificial intelligence company called X.AI Corp., according to a Nevada state filing cited by media reports. Throughout the past few months the tech guru was described as recruiting researchers. As for a "truth-seeking" chatbot, Musk had tweeted back in February that “what we need is TruthGPT”. The billionaire had been one of a group that drew attention to the risks with which large-scale AI models, such as GPT-4, are fraught. Musk had joined a group of tech executives and experts calling for a freeze on "giant AI experiments” until reliable safety standards were established.