Elon Musk says he is working on his own AI chatbot called 'TruthGPT'
Despite Elon Musk's public opposition to advanced AI development due to its potential risks to society, he has taken several steps recently which have caused people to speculate that Musk is working on his own AI project.
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On Monday, in an interview with Fox News' Tucker Carlson, Musk confirmed those speculations, revealing that he is creating his own AI model called TruthGPT.
'An AI that cares about understanding the universe is unlikely to annihilate humans.'@elonmusk tells @TuckerCarlson why he's creating 'Truth GPT' pic.twitter.com/ZylwsfkZfq
— Fox News (@FoxNews) April 18, 2023
Musk defines TruthGPT as a "maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe" in the interview. He later adds that "an AI that cares about understanding the universe is unlikely to annihilate humans."
Musk opined that ChatGPT is trained to be "politically correct," which is "simply another way of saying untruthful things," hence the truth component of his AI model's name.
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This interview came only a few days after reports of Musk starting his own AI company.
As first reported by The Wall Street Journal, a Nevada state filing made last month reveals that Musk created a company called X.AI Corp. Musk is listed as the sole director of the company, which has authorized the sale of 100 million shares.
The name of this AI company relates to Twitter's new company name, X Corp. Both of the X references in the AI company's name and Twitter's new name trace back to Elon's longtime plan for "X, the everything app," a multi-faceted app that would serve as a one-stop shop for most users' needs.
Musk has recently purchased 10,000 graphic processing units (GPUs) for Twitter, which are crucial for machine learning models, a sign of a potential generative AI project on the horizon, such as his TruthGPT project.
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To further confirm the existence of an AI project in the works, Musk hired new AI talent -- engineers Igor Babuschkin and Manuel Kroiss -- in early March.
Musk has previous experience in the AI space as one of the co-founders of OpenAI -- the AI research company behind ChatGPT -- before pulling out in 2018.