Billionaire and Twitter CEO Elon Musk has said that there is a need for a truth-seeking AI criticising Microsoft-backed Open AI for ‘training the AI to lie’. According to a report in Reuters, Musk in an interview with Fox News Channel said that he will launch an artificial intelligence (AI) platform called 'TruthGPT' to counter the rival ChatGPT. He said that OpenAI has now become a 'closed source', 'for-profit' organisation 'closely allied with Microsoft'. He further accused co-founder of Google, Larry Page of not taking AI safety seriously.
"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," Musk said in the interview, as quoted by Reuters. He added that the TruthGPT "might be the best path to safety" that would be "unlikely to annihilate humans".
Musk said, "It's simply starting late. But I will try to create a third option."
Reuters mentioned that people familiar with the matter said that Musk has been poaching AI researchers from Alphabet Inc's Google to launch a startup to rival OpenAI.
This is not the first time Musk has reiterated his thoughts on Truth AI. In February this year, he had tweeted, "What we need is TruthGPT".
The development comes after Musk and a group of AI experts and industry executives called for a six-month pause in developing systems that are more powerful than OpenAI's GPT-4. They viewed these as potential risks to society.
Musk said in the interview, "AI is more dangerous than, say, mismanaged aircraft design or production maintenance or bad car production." He added, "It has the potential of civilizational destruction."
As per a report in the Verge, Musk said, “We recognize humanity could decide to hunt down all the chimpanzees and kill them...We’re actually glad that they exist, and we aspire to protect their habitats.”
To substantiate his point, he said that a super-intelligent AI can write incredibly well and potentially manipulate public opinions, Reuters mentioned in the report.
Musk had tweeted over the weekend that he met with former US President Barack Obama when he was president and told him that Washington needed to "encourage AI regulation".
Notably, Elon Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015, but he stepped down from the company's board in 2018. He tweeted a year later that he left OpenAI because he had to focus on Tesla and SpaceX. He also mentioned that other reasons of his leaving the board were, "Tesla was competing for some of the same people as OpenAI & I didn’t agree with some of what OpenAI team wanted to do," reported Reuters.