Global Courant 2023-04-15 21:59:10
After criticizing OpenAI for ChatGPT’s advances, the billionaire went public with his company.
Elon Musk last month registered a Nevada-based artificial intelligence (AI) company called X.AI. According to an article published by the Financial Times on Friday, the new company will compete with OpenAI, the Californian start-up that developed ChatGPT, an AI program capable of interacting with humans and producing all kinds of texts.
The success of this interface since its launch at the end of November has caused a competition in the development of this technology due to its great potential.
According to various specialized media, the owner of Twitter, Tesla and SpaceX has hired Igor Babuschkin and Manuel Kroiss, both from DeepMind, the AI branch of Alphabet (Google’s parent company), also involved in the dispute over control of this technology. .
This move by Musk clashes with a public stance he himself took last month, when he signed a call to pause AI development.
The hundreds of signatories who supported this text warned of the risks of this technology and asked themselves: “Is it desirable to develop non-human minds that, ultimately, could surpass us in number and intelligence and replace us?”
Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015, before leaving the company in 2018.
He has since criticized the company, including in a tweet last December in which he claimed that the AI is being trained to be “woke” (a term for the American left), that is, to “lie”.
In the official registration document of X.AI, dated March 9, 2023, Elon Musk appears as the sole director and a secretary, Jared Birchall, a former Morgan Stanley banker who manages the billionaire’s fortune, according to the Financial Times newspaper.
Meanwhile, OpenAI says to pause GPT-5
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, Musk’s current rival. Photo File
Sam Altman, CEO and co-founder of OpenAI, confirmed that his company will not develop GPT-5, the presumed successor to its artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot GPT-4, “for some time,” after a group of industry entrepreneurs Technologist -among them Elon Musk- requested in a letter with an apocalyptic tone that AI systems be suspended for six months.
“more powerful than GPT-4” Altman said the letter was “missing most of the technical nuances about where we need to pause,” during a conference held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which he attended for videoconference.
He also assured that his company is not working on the development of a GPT-5, so the letter – which has already been signed by more than 25,000 people – seemed a bit “ridiculous”.
Although he agreed with the idea that OpenAI has to “move with caution”, since there is “increasing rigor in security matters” and that is “really important”.
“I also agree that as capabilities become more and more serious, the bar for security must be raised,” Altman said at the institution event.
OpenAI created ChatGPT and then GPT-4, an AI chatbot that can generate human-like responses in a matter of seconds, and Microsoft uses its technology in its Bing chatbot.
However, the fact that OpenAI is not working on GPT-5 does not mean that it is not expanding the capabilities of GPT-4.
For those most concerned about the rapid growth of these AI technologies, Altman’s announcement that OpenAI is not developing GPT-5 is no consolation, as the company is expanding the potential of GPT-4 by connecting it to the internet, for example. , and, furthermore, it could launch a GPT-4.5, as it did with GPT-3.5.
Likewise, OpenAI is not the only company that is working on this type of tool.
“Society has taken a break from other technologies with potentially catastrophic effects on society. We can do it here. Let’s enjoy a long summer break from AI and don’t rush to fall unprepared,” the open letter asked at the end of March. Published by the nonprofit Future of Life Institute.
The letter was signed by Musk, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, and American researchers Yoshua Bengio and Stuart Russel, among many others.
