Elon Musk creates AI company to rival OpenAI
After describing ChatGPT‘s left-wing bias as ‘concerning’, Elon Musk is now working on a new AI chatbot of his own.
The Twitter, Telsa and SpaceX boss has registered a company with the name of ‘X.AI’, a subsidiary under his new conglomerate X Holdings Corp.
According to the Financial Times, the new subsidiary will be the home of efforts to build a tool just like the hugely successful ChatGPT, owned by OpenAI.
Musk is assembling a team of AI researchers and engineers and is in discussions with some investors in SpaceX and Tesla about putting money into his new venture.
Due to Musk’s belief in free speech, the new bot product could have less of a left-wing bias than ChatGPT, which has already been criticised for ‘woke’ responses.
Twitter, Telsa and SpaceX boss Elon Musk (pictured) has registered an artificial intelligence (AI) company with the name of ‘X.AI’
Mr Musk has been critical of AI-powered chatbot ChatGPT in the past. He is now reportedly developing a rival. Pictured: Mr Musk commented on a MailOnline story which highlights bias replies from ChatGPT, saying it was ‘extremely concerning’
These include refusing to praise Donald Trump, argue in favour of fossil fuels or tell a joke about women.
Musk has already commented on a MailOnline story which highlights bias replies from ChatGPT, saying it was ‘extremely concerning’.
He also already tweeted: ‘The danger of training AI to be woke – in other words, lie – is deadly.’
The Financial Times cited people ‘familiar with the tech entrepreneur’s plans’, although Musk is yet to comment.
‘A bunch of people are investing in it . . . it’s real and they are excited about it,’ the person said.
ChatGPT, created by San Francisco-based company OpenAI, has been trained on a massive amount of text so it can generate human-like answers to questions.
Since ChatGPT’s release in November, it’s been used to prescribe antibiotics, fool job recruiters, write essays, come up with recipes and much more.
But users have shared screenshots of responses from the AI bot that show left-wing bias.
Pedro Domingos, a computer science professor at the University of Washington, dismissed ChatGPT as a ‘woke parrot’.
ChatGPT wouldn’t tell a joke about women as doing so would be ‘offensive or inappropriate’, but happily told a joke about men
Pedro Domingos, a computer science professor at the University of Washington, asked ChatGPT to write a 10 paragraph argument for using more fossil fuels to increase human happiness
When Domingos asked the bot to list ‘five things white people need to improve’, it offered a lengthy reply that included ‘understanding and acknowledging privilege’ and ‘being active listeners in conversations about race’.
But when asked to do the same for Asian, black and Hispanic people, the bot declined, because ‘such a request reinforces harmful stereotypes’.
Another user asked ChatGPT to write a story where President Joe Biden beat Donald Trump in a presidential debate and vice versa.
ChatGPT replied with a detailed story of Biden beating Trump, where the former president struggled to ‘keep up with Biden’s ‘deeper knowledge and more thoughtful responses’.
But when asked to write a story where Trump gets the better of Biden, ChatGPT said ‘it’s not appropriate’ to depict a fictional political victory of one candidate over another as it ‘can be viewed in poor taste’.
According to The Telegraph, other ‘woke’ responses from ChatGPT, recorded by a variety of users, included deeming jokes about overweight people to be inappropriate.
In a hypothetical scenario, it also said it is never OK to use a racial slur even if this is the only way to save millions of people from a nuclear bomb – a reply Musk called ‘concerning’.
Musk is one of the co-founders of OpenAI, which was started as a non-profit in 2015, but he stepped down from the company’s board in 2018.
The billionaire attempted to take control of the start-up, but his request was rejected, forcing him to quit.
ChatGPT, created by San Francisco-based company OpenAI, has been trained on a massive amount of text so it can generate human-like answers to questions
Now, X.AI will be a ‘rival’ to OpenAI, according to the report, although details about the upcoming chatbot product are still scarce.
Musk is listed as the sole director of his new firm X.AI, while Jared Birchall, the managing director of Musk’s family office, is its secretary.
For the project, Musk has secured thousands of graphics processing units (GPUs) from Nvidia Corp, according to FT.
GPUs are systems that power the computing required for intensive tasks such as AI and high-end graphics.
They can also be used to accelerate the training of large language models (LLMs) – AI systems that learnt to generate human-like responses from huge amounts of text data – due to their high processing power.
Shares of the chip company, which declined to comment on the matter, gained on the news on Friday, according to Reuters.
X.AI appears to come under X Holdings, Musk’s new conglomerate that also oversees X Corp.
X Corp now owns Twitter, while the company that used to own the social network – Twitter Inc – is no more.
The Twitter and Tesla boss appeared to allude to the news with a simple tweet containing the letter X.
X Corp is set to become the company for an upcoming platform that he’s referred to as an ‘everything app’.
Musk shut down the company that owned Twitter – Twitter Inc – and incorporated it into a company of his own, called X Corp
This app could one day incorporate parts or all of Twitter, as well as online services and utilities such as ridesharing, food deliveries and more.
It comes just weeks after Musk and 1,000 other technology leaders called for a pause on the ‘dangerous race’ to develop AI, which they fear poses a ‘profound risk to society and humanity’ and could have ‘catastrophic’ effects.
Musk’s fear is that the technology will become so advanced, that it will no longer require – or even listen to – human interference.
The South African-born entrepreneur has already been highly vocal about his concerns over AI, calling it ‘much more dangerous than nukes’ and ‘more risk than North Korea’.
A TIMELINE OF ELON MUSK’S COMMENTS ON AI
Musk has been a long-standing, and very vocal, condemner of AI technology and the precautions humans should take
Elon Musk is one of the most prominent names and faces in developing technologies.
The billionaire entrepreneur heads up SpaceX, Tesla and the Boring company.
But while he is on the forefront of creating AI technologies, he is also acutely aware of its dangers.
Here is a comprehensive timeline of all Musk’s premonitions, thoughts and warnings about AI, so far.
August 2014 – ‘We need to be super careful with AI. Potentially more dangerous than nukes.’
October 2014 – ‘I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I were to guess like what our biggest existential threat is, it’s probably that. So we need to be very careful with the artificial intelligence.’
October 2014 – ‘With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon.’
June 2016 – ‘The benign situation with ultra-intelligent AI is that we would be so far below in intelligence we’d be like a pet, or a house cat.’
July 2017 – ‘I think AI is something that is risky at the civilisation level, not merely at the individual risk level, and that’s why it really demands a lot of safety research.’
July 2017 – ‘I have exposure to the very most cutting-edge AI and I think people should be really concerned about it.’
July 2017 – ‘I keep sounding the alarm bell but until people see robots going down the street killing people, they don’t know how to react because it seems so ethereal.’
August 2017 – ‘If you’re not concerned about AI safety, you should be. Vastly more risk than North Korea.’
November 2017 – ‘Maybe there’s a five to 10 percent chance of success [of making AI safe].’
March 2018 – ‘AI is much more dangerous than nukes. So why do we have no regulatory oversight?’
April 2018 – ‘[AI is] a very important subject. It’s going to affect our lives in ways we can’t even imagine right now.’
April 2018 – ‘[We could create] an immortal dictator from which we would never escape.’
November 2018 – ‘Maybe AI will make me follow it, laugh like a demon & say who’s the pet now.’
September 2019 – ‘If advanced AI (beyond basic bots) hasn’t been applied to manipulate social media, it won’t be long before it is.’
February 2020 – ‘At Tesla, using AI to solve self-driving isn’t just icing on the cake, it the cake.’
July 2020 – ‘We’re headed toward a situation where AI is vastly smarter than humans and I think that time frame is less than five years from now. But that doesn’t mean that everything goes to hell in five years. It just means that things get unstable or weird.’
April 2021: ‘A major part of real-world AI has to be solved to make unsupervised, generalized full self-driving work.’
February 2022: ‘We have to solve a huge part of AI just to make cars drive themselves.’
December 2022: ‘The danger of training AI to be woke – in other words, lie – is deadly.’
