Multi billionaire Elon Musk – according to reports in the Wall Street Journal – is reportedly working to found a new start-up for the development of artificial intelligence called X.AI, with the aim of developing his own TruthGPT project.
The multifaceted South African entrepreneur would not be new to the world of artificial intelligence. In fact, he was co-founder in 2015, along with Sam Altman (current CEO), of OpenAI, which, to date, represents the most successful company in this field.
Musk left the OpenAI board in 2018. This, after alleged disagreements with other members of management who allegedly denied him control of the company. X.AI’s goal would be to give birth to a new artificial intelligence called TruthGPT, about which there is no information yet, however.
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What we know so far about X.Ai and TruthGPT
According to the WSJ, Musk would form this new company in Nevada and be its sole director. As a director, Musk, would choose as a collaborator Igor Babuschkin. Formerly working for OpenAI, he just finished a stint as a research engineer at DeepMind, an artificial intelligence company controlled by Alphabet.
These are Elon Musk’s words:
I am going to launch something called Truth GPT or an artificial intelligence that seeks the ultimate truth and seeks to understand the nature of the universe.
The race for better artificial intelligence has just begun and Elon Musk seems intent on participating in it.
Indiscretions reveal that Musk has reportedly purchased 10,000 graphical processing units (GPUs) to develop this AI and is looking for investors among those already participating in SpaceX and Tesla shares to replenish the project’s coffers and encourage faster development.
Elon Musk’s fears of AI and petition for stop developments
Since the periods immediately following his departure from the OpenAI board, Musk has been negative about the development of artificial intelligence, at least in the forms it has taken recently.
Musk’s critical stance seemed so entrenched that it led him to sign a petition, made available by the nonprofit Future of Life Institute called “Pause Giant AI Experiments.”
The petition called for an immediate stop in training artificial intelligence systems more powerful than GPT-4 by at least six months.
The rationale for the request, according to the letter, was the fear of developing intelligence systems competitive to human intelligence that could pose serious risks to society and humanity. The letter reads:
Advanced AI could represent a profound change in the history of life on Earth and should be planned and managed with care and adequate resources. Unfortunately, this level of planning and management is not happening, even though in recent months artificial intelligence labs have been locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy increasingly powerful digital minds that no one, not even their creators, can reliably understand, predict or control.
Musk’s signature to the petition is alongside those of more than 1,000 experts in the field of artificial intelligence and many famous names in the computer industry such as Steve Wozniak, co-founder, in 1976, of Apple.
Musk also responded to a tweet from Genevieve Roch-Decter, CEO of Grit Capital, who pressed him on the very criticism of AI development after co-founding OpenAI.
Musk in response communicated that he founded OpenAI with the purpose of developing open source artificial intelligence and that the non-profit spirit with which the company was founded has been betrayed by the current management that has turned it into a company dedicated to profit and controlled by Microsoft.
How will the race toward the “perfect” artificial intelligence proceed? Only time will tell.
