Global Courant 2023-04-18 14:57:16
Billionaire Twitter owner Elon Musk is once again ringing the warning bells about the dangers of artificial intelligence to humanity – claiming that a popular chatbot has a liberal bias that he intends to counter with his own AI creation.
Musk told Fox News host Tucker Carlson in a segment that aired Monday night that he plans to create an alternative to the popular AI chatbot ChatGPT that he calls “TruthGPT,” which will be a “maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to of of the universe.”
The idea, Musk said, is that an AI that wants to understand humanity is less likely to destroy it.
Musk also said he fears ChatGPT is being “trained to be politically correct”.
In the first of a two-part interview with Carlson, Musk also advocated for the regulation of artificial intelligence, saying he is a “big fan”. He called AI “more dangerous” than cars or missiles and said it has the potential to destroy humanity.
Separately, Musk has formed a new company called X.AI Corp, according to a Nevada company filing. The Nevada Secretary of State’s office website says the company was incorporated on March 9 and lists Musk as director and his longtime adviser, Jared Birchall, as secretary.
Musk has expressed strong opinions on artificial intelligence for years and has fired other technology leaders, including Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates, for what he says has “limited” knowledge of the field.
Musk was an early investor in OpenAI – the startup behind ChatGPT – and served as co-chair of the board of directors upon its founding in 2015 as a non-profit AI research lab. But Musk only stayed there for a few years, resigning from the board in early 2018 in a move that linked the San Francisco startup to Tesla’s work building automated drive systems. “As Tesla becomes increasingly focused on AI, this will eliminate any potential future conflict for Elon,” OpenAI said in a February 2018 blog post.
“I came up with the name and the concept,” Musk told Carlson, lamenting that OpenAI is now closely tied to Microsoft and no longer a nonprofit.
Musk explained his departure in 2019, saying it was also related to his need to focus on technical issues at Tesla and some disagreements with OpenAI’s leaders. It was “just better to break up on good terms,” he said.
“Tesla was competing for the same people as OpenAI and I disagreed with what the OpenAI team wanted to do,” Musk tweeted, without specifying.
But there have been questions about the quality of Tesla’s AI systems. US safety regulators last month announced an investigation into a fatal crash involving a Tesla suspected of using an automated driving system when it collided with a parked fire truck in California.
The fire truck probe is part of a larger agency investigation into multiple cases of Teslas using the automaker’s Autopilot system crashing into parked emergency vehicles causing other accidents. NHTSA has become more aggressive in pursuing safety issues with Teslas over the past year, announcing multiple recalls and investigations.
In the year after Musk resigned from the board, OpenAI was still a long way from working on ChatGPT, but publicly unveiled the first generation of its GPT system, on which ChatGPT is based, and began a major shift to include itself as a for-profit company.
By 2020, Musk tweeted that “OpenAI should be more open,” noting that he had “no control and only very limited insight” into it.
Sometimes he was complementary. In the days following ChatGPT’s release on November 30, Musk tweeted to Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, that it is “scary good” and complained that the news media did not cover it widely because “ChatGPT is not a far-left thing.”
Since then, however, Musk has repeatedly cited examples he believes show leftist bias or censorship. Like other chatbots, ChatGPT has filters that try to prevent it from spewing out toxic or offensive answers.
