Elon Musk, billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, announced on Monday that he will be launching an artificial intelligence (AI) platform called "TruthGPT". The new platform will be in direct competition with the offerings from Microsoft and Google. Musk criticized Microsoft-backed OpenAI, the firm behind the chatbot sensation ChatGPT, stating that the company has been "training the AI to lie". He also accused Google co-founder Larry Page of not taking AI safety seriously.
In an interview with Fox News Channel's Tucker Carlson, Musk stated that TruthGPT will be a "maximum truth-seeking AI" that will try to understand the nature of the universe. Musk believes that TruthGPT "might be the best path to safety" and is "unlikely to annihilate humans". Musk also called for AI regulation and reiterated his warnings about the dangers of AI, stating that "AI has the potential of civilizational destruction".
Musk has been poaching AI researchers from Google to launch a startup to rival OpenAI, according to sources familiar with the matter. He has also registered a new firm named X.AI Corp, incorporated in Nevada, with Musk as the sole director and Jared Birchall, the managing director of Musk's family office, as a secretary.
Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015 but stepped down from the company's board in 2018. In 2019, he tweeted that he left OpenAI because he had to focus on Tesla and SpaceX, but he also cited disagreements with the OpenAI team and competition for the same people as Tesla.
In January, Microsoft announced a multi-billion dollar investment in OpenAI, intensifying competition with Google and fueling the race to attract AI funding in Silicon Valley. However, Musk's new venture into the AI industry with TruthGPT could potentially disrupt the market and bring a new perspective to the development of AI technology.