Twitter CEO Elon Musk has confirmed that he will build an AI model to counter ChatGPT, the popular AI chatbot backed by Microsoft.
Musk says he will name it “TruthGPT” and make its code transparent, to offer the tech industry an alternative to what he has dubbed a closed-source code “effectively controlled by Microsoft.”
Musk was a co-founder and a financier of ChatGPT creator OpenAI, but he reportedly walked away after OpenAI’s founders rejected his offer to take over the research company. Musk has since criticized ChatGPT, accusing OpenAI of “training the AI to lie.”
In an interview to Fox News broadcaster Tucker Carlson on Apr. 17, Musk touted his AI alternative as “the best path to safety,” one “unlikely to annihilate humans” because he would be focused on trying to “understand the nature of the universe.”
Should Musk finally launch TruthGPT, he would be competing not just against ChatGPT, but other AI systems like Google’s Bard. In the Carlson interview, Musk had a bone to pick with Google co-founder Larry Page, accusing him of doing little to create universal AI safety. Musk also said he attempted to make OpenAI the “furthest thing from Google.”
ChatGPT has limitations
Critics of ChatGPT claim it generates answers with political bias. In February, ChatGPT reportedly refused to generate a poem about former US president Donald Trump but wrote a thrilling one about current president Joe Biden. Musk said that was “a serious concern.”
Despite launching GPT-4 with trillions of data parameters, Microsoft’s anchor AI project has been criticized for its lack of emotional intelligence, failure to understand different contexts, lack of accuracy, limitation to detect typos, and its inability to generating long-form, structured content.
Italy temporarily banned ChatGPT this month citing data privacy concerns, and vowed to investigate whether it breached the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation.
Musk called for the creation of a body to crowdsource regulatory proposals from the global AI industry and draft laws and ethical guidelines to be adopted by all tech companies. “I think we have a better chance of advanced AI being beneficial to humanity in that circumstance,” he said in the interview.