Elon Musk and AI: Why is he criticizing AI and starting a company to develop AI?

Famous billionaire Elon Musk believes that the development of artificial intelligence (AI) may threaten the destruction of humanity. On the other hand, he recently launched X.AI, a company that will focus on AI development. According to him, he is also going to create a chatbot to "seek the truth" and even invented a name for it: TruthGPT.

Can AI destroy us?

Elon Musk seems to believe it. At least, he expressed such opinion in an interview with Fox News.

According to him, AI "has the potential to destroy civilization", and something similar has already been shown in the "Terminator" movies.

“But it's not going to be like in “Terminator”, because the intelligence will be in the data centers. Robots will only be the final factor," Musk said.

According to him, everything goes to the fact that AI will make decisions instead of people, and one day it may turn out that people will no longer be able to turn it off. The problem is that, as experience shows, restrictions in one or another area are usually introduced "only after something bad happens". In this case, if problems start to arise due to AI, it may already be too late to introduce restrictions.

"Some form of government control is necessary because it [AI] poses a threat to people," Musk said.

He also recently signed an open letter calling for an end to the development of advanced AI. That letter was also signed by thousands of scientists, AI experts and industry leaders.

Another AI development company

While Musk is, at first glance, wary of AI, he recently registered a company called X.AI to focus on AI development. According to official documents, X.AI Corp. is registered in Nevada, and the name of the company indirectly indicates the scope of its further activities.

Elon Musk is currently listed as the sole director of X.AI, while his family manager Jared Birchall is the company's nominal head. He also heads Musk's Neuralink startup, which is supposed to create implants to "connect" the human brain to a computer. So far, however, the company has achieved little, and the it is not allowed to test the implants on humans.

Interestingly, Musk was one of the founders of OpenAI, the company that developed the popular ChatGPT. However, due to a conflict with the current head of the company, Sam Altman, Musk left the company in 2018. It is said that later he wanted to invest in the company, but his offer was rejected. Musk himself began criticizing ChatGPT, calling it politically biased.

Musk recently hired AI specialist Igor Babushkin, who worked at DeepMind Lab. He also tried to bring some OpenAI employees to work with him, and all this only confirms his interest in the topic of AI. And therefore, there is nothing surprising in the fact that, in the end, he decided to open his own company, which will develop AI.

True, it is not yet known what exactly will be developed there. It might be the AI used in Tesla's electric car autopilot system. Maybe it will be a generative AI that will integrate with Twitter. It is also possible that it will be something completely new and unexpected, which is still difficult to imagine.

AI: Is it the only hope for the truth?

In an interview with Fox News, Musk said that he would like to create an alternative to the popular ChatGPT chat-bot and call it, as mentioned above, TruthGPT. According to his plan, it will be an AI aimed at "searching for the truth".

According to him, it must be an AI system that seeks to understand humanity, and thus is unlikely to be able to destroy it. TruthGPT, in his opinion, can become a "third option" for users who will be faced with a choice between OpenAI's ChatGPT and Alphabet/DeepMind developments.

One of the goals of TruthGPT, according to Musk, will be to "understand the nature of the universe." As the billionaire himself noted, "this can be the best guarantee of security, because if AI thinks about understanding the universe, then it is unlikely to start destroying people, we are an interesting part of it, aren't we?"