Musk plans AI creation to counter ‘politically correct’ ChatGPT

Billionaire Twitter owner Elon Musk has claimed that a popular chatbot has a liberal bias that he plans to counter with his own AI creation.

Mr Musk told Fox News host Tucker Carlson that he plans to create an alternative to ChatGPT that he is calling “TruthGPT”, which will be a “maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe”.

He said the idea is that an AI that wants to understand humanity is less likely to destroy it.

The Tesla and SpaceX owner also said he is worried that ChatGPT “is being trained to be politically correct”.

In the first of a two-part interview with Mr Carlson, Mr Musk also advocated for the regulation of artificial intelligence, saying he’s a “big fan”. He called AI “more dangerous” than cars or rockets and said it has the potential to destroy humanity.

Separately, Mr Musk has incorporated a new business called X.AI Corp, according to a Nevada business filing.

The website of the Nevada secretary of state’s office says the business was formed on March 9 and lists Mr Musk as its director and his adviser, Jared Birchall, as secretary.

Mr Musk has for many years expressed strong opinions about artificial intelligence and has dismissed other tech leaders, including Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates, for having what he has described as a “limited” understanding of the field.

Mr Musk was an early investor in OpenAI — the startup behind ChatGPT — and co-chaired its board upon its 2015 founding as a nonprofit AI research lab.

But he only lasted there for a few years, resigning from the board in early 2018 in a move that the San Francisco start-up tied to Tesla’s work on building automated driving systems.

“As Tesla continues to become more focused on AI, this will eliminate a potential future conflict for Elon,” OpenAI said in a February 2018 blog post.

“I came up with the name and the concept,” Mr Musk told Mr Carlson, lamenting that OpenAI is now closely allied with Microsoft and is no longer a non-profit.

Mr Musk elaborated on his departure in 2019, saying it was also related to his need to focus on engineering problems at Tesla and some differences of opinion with OpenAI’s leaders. It was “just better to part ways on good terms”, he said.

“Tesla was competing for some of same people as OpenAI & I didn’t agree with some of what OpenAI team wanted to do,” Mr Musk tweeted, without specifying.

But there have been questions surrounding 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 ran into a parked fire engine in California.

The fire engine probe is part of a larger investigation by the agency into multiple instances of Teslas using the automaker’s Autopilot system crashing into parked emergency vehicles that are attending other crashes.

In the year after Mr Musk resigned from the board, OpenAI was still far away from working on ChatGPT but publicly unveiled the first generation of its GPT system, on which ChatGPT is founded, and began a major shift to incorporate itself as a for-profit business.

By 2020, Mr Musk was tweeting that “OpenAI should be more open” while noting that he had “no control & only very limited insight” into it.