“Investing in ChatGPT was an ironic and unfortunate mistake”
If you thought Elon Musk already had too much on his plate, being the CEO of Tesla, Twitter, SpaceX and two smaller companies, wait till you hear that he’s planning to adhere on his AI journey.
As he previously announced (of course, on Twitter) in February, he’s on a mission to launch a so-called TruthGPT.
Having stepped away as an investor in OpenAI’s ChatGPT – which he later said was an unfortunate mistake – he had also signed a pledge to pause any further development of AI, with a warning that this technology is progressing at an uncontrollably fast pace.
With that in mind, many were quick to judge his sudden drive to release a new AI chatbot alternative. Considering it’s already a highly competitive field, one may wonder what Musk’s software will have to offer that others don’t.
According to an interview recorded previously this month, his dissatisfaction with the current AI chatbot alternatives lies in them being “overly politically correct.” From his point of view, that is just another way of saying untruthful things, he said in the interview.
“A path to AI dystopia is to train AI to be deceptive,” Musk noticed.
On that note, he strongly believes that major players in the industry, such as OpenAI, are training AI to lie and agrees it’s ironic that he previously participated in funding this project.
AI is more dangerous than, say, mismanaged aircraft design or production maintenance or bad car production. It has the potential for civilization destruction (…) I’m going to start something which I call TruthGPT, or a maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe.
Source: Elon Musk in an interview for “Tucker Carlson Tonight”
As the Washington Post pointed out in their article, this show caters to a conservative audience so it’s no wonder that the conversation about AI in this interview was centered around it being dangerous and a possible threat to humanity.
“Things are headed to AI taking over control”
Nevertheless, Musk has started a new start-up dubbed X.AI in Nevada, claiming that his AI will be different, safe, and free from misinformation. That’s all the announcements we know of so far but, considering the name TruthGPT, it’s obvious that it will be relying on the latest version of GPT-4 technology.
From the public reaction, people either agree with Musk or highly disagree and dismiss his arguments as being too exaggerated. Either way, a point to which both parties agree is the fact that artificial intelligence is in desperate need of regulation in order not to be misused.
“I’ve been a strong advocate for AI regulation. It’s not fun to be regulated, but if companies are cutting corners on safety, people will suffer as a result. I think it needs to start with a group that initially seeks insight into AI, and then has proposed rulemaking, and then those rules would hopefully gradually be accepted by the major players in AI. We’ll have a better chance of advanced AI being beneficial to humanity in that circumstance,” he stated in the mentioned interview.
The way he sees it, if the regulations are put into place only after something terrible has happened, it may be too late cause things might be out of control at that point.
When asked if he believes that AI could reach a point where it could take over control and cannot be turned off, he simply responded – Absolutely.
“That’s where things are headed, for sure,” he concluded.
