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Elon Musk said on Monday that he plans to make an AI platform called “TruthGPT” to fight with what Microsoft and Google already have.
Elon Musk also said that Microsoft-backed OpenAI, the company behind the popular chatbot ChatGPT, “taught the AI to lie.” It said that OpenAI had turned into a “closed source,” “for-profit,” and “closely tied to Microsoft” organization.
He also said that Larry Page, who helped start Google, didn’t care about AI safety.
Elon Musk told Fox News Channel’s Tucker Carlson in an interview that will show later on Monday, “I’m going to start something I call “TruthGPT,” which is a maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to figure out how the universe works.”
“And I think this might be the best way to stay safe, in the sense that an AI that cares about understanding the universe is unlikely to wipe out humans because we are an interesting part of the universe,” he said.
Reuters asked Elon Musk, OpenAI, and Page for comments, but they did not reply right away.
People who know about the situation told Reuters that Elon Musk has been hiring AI researchers from Alphabet Inc’s Google to start a company that will compete with OpenAI.
State records show that Elon Musk just registered a company in Nevada called X.AI Corp. Musk is the only person listed as a director, and Jared Birchall, who runs Musk’s family office, is named as the secretary.
Even though Elon Musk and a group of AI experts and business leaders had called for a six-month break from making systems more powerful than OpenAI’s just-launched GPT-4, because of possible risks to society, this move was made anyway.
Musk also warned again about AI during the talk with Carlson. According to the excerpts, he said, “AI is more dangerous than, say, bad aircraft design, production maintenance, or bad car production.”
“It could lead to the end of human civilization,” he said.
He said, for example, that a super-smart AI can write very well and might be able to change people’s minds.
He wrote on Twitter over the weekend that he had talked with former U.S. President Barack Obama when Obama was in office and told him that Washington needed to “encourage AI regulation.”
Elon Musk helped start OpenAI in 2015, but he quit the company’s board of directors in 2018. In 2019, he wrote on Twitter that he had to leave OpenAI to work at Tesla and SpaceX.
He also tweeted at the time that he was leaving OpenAI because “Tesla was competing with OpenAI for some of the same people, and I didn’t agree with some of what the OpenAI team wanted to do.”
Musk is the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX. He is also the CEO of Twitter, which he bought for $44 billion last year and now runs as well.
Musk told Fox News that he recently thought Twitter was worth “less than half” of what it was bought for.
In January, Microsoft Corp. announced a new investment of billions of dollars in OpenAI. This increased competition with rival Google and sped up the race in Silicon Valley to get AI money.
