Elon Musk plans to take on ChatGPT and Google with ‘truth-seeking’ AI platform

▶ Billionaire owner of Twitter says his offering ‘might be the best path to safety’ to curb dangers of tech

Twitter chief executive Elon Musk plans to develop a new generative artificial intelligence platform to challenge Microsoft- backed OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard.

The platform, which the billionaire calls TruthGPT, would become a “third option” to what he calls “the two heavyweights” currently dominating a market that has become the new darling of investors, Mr Musk told Fox News host Tucker Carlson.

“I’m going to start a maximum truth- seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe,” Mr Musk told Carlson in the interview aired on Monday.

“And I think this might be the best path to safety, in the sense that an AI that cares about understanding the universe, it is unlikely to annihilate humans because we are an interesting part of the universe.”

Generative AI is a type of artificial intelligence technology that can produce various kinds of data, including audio, code, images, text, simulations, 3D objects and videos. While it takes cues from existing data, it is also capable of generating new and unexpected outputs, according to GenerativeAI.net.

Mr Musk’s announcement confirms earlier reports by San Francisco- based technology news site The Information in March and the Financial Times last week on his plans to throw his hat into the generative AI race. The Information said he was assembling a team, which includes a former engineer at a unit of Google parent Alphabet, to develop a rival to ChatGPT.

It said Mr Musk was in discussions with Igor Babuschkin, who recently left Google’s DeepMind AI, to lead a group of artificial intelligence researchers in the endeavour.

The Financial Times, meanwhile, said Mr Musk was building a team of AI researchers and engineers, and also in talks with various investors in his other ventures, such as SpaceX and Tesla, about pumping capital into his new AI start-up.

He has also ordered “thousands” of high-powered graphic-processing unit (GPU) chips from technology company Nvidia, the report said.

GPUs are chips capable of running many tasks simultaneously, which are necessary in building generative AI’s large language models.

Filings in the US state of Nevada from last month show that Mr Musk has founded a new company called X.AI Corp.

The global generative AI market is expected to reach $188.62 billion by 2032, growing at an annual rate of more than 36 per cent from $ 8.65 billion last year, according to Brainy Insights. It could also drive a 7 per cent – or almost $7 trillion – increase in the global economy and lift productivity growth by 1.5 percentage points over a 10-year period, Goldman Sachs has estimated.

Investors have poured in more than $4.2 billion through 215 deals into generative AI start-ups in 2021 and 2022 after interest spiked in 2019, figures from CB Insights show. About $586 million in 20 deals during the same period has gone to generative interfaces, it said.

Mr Musk, who co-founded the California-based start-up OpenAI in 2015, left its board in 2018 following disagreements over the direction the company was taking. However, in 2019, he tweeted that the need to focus on Tesla and SpaceX was the reason he left OpenAI.

He has also been critical of the company in recent months, arguing that OpenAI is placing several safety nets to prevent ChatGPT from offering results that might be divisive or offend its users. That implies that his planned TruthGPT chatbot might have fewer restrictions.

ChatGPT was launched in November by OpenAI – the world’s most valuable generative AI start-up – and quickly gained popularity as it can generate written content with a simple request within seconds. In January, technology company Microsoft announced the third phase of its long- term partnership with OpenAI through a new multiyear, multibillion-dollar investment, worth a reported $10 billion.

Earlier this month, Google, meanwhile, unveiled its own conversational AI service, Bard.

However, days later, Bard made a factual error in a promotional video during a company event in Paris, causing $100 billion to be wiped off Google’s market value.

Mr Musk had criticisms for both companies during the interview with Carlson, saying that OpenAI is “training the AI to lie” and that it has become a “closed source”, “for-profit” platform “closely allied with Microsoft”.

He also accused Google co-founder Larry Page of not taking AI safety seriously and that their disagreements were the reason OpenAI now exists.

“The reason OpenAI exists at all is that Larry Page and I used to be close friends and I would stay at his house in Palo Alto, and I would talk to him late into the night about AI safety,” Mr Musk said.

Mr Musk has reportedly ordered ‘ thousands’ of high-performance GPU chips from technology company Nvidia