Billionaire Elon Musk revealed during a recent interview with Tucker Carlson that he intends to create a “maximum truth-seeking AI” named TruthGPT. Musk’s program would rival the OpenAI program ChatGPT.
Musk has developed a new chatbot he calls “TruthGPT” after becoming concerned that ChatGPT’s chatbots are trained to lie. ChatGPT is a chat AI with a range of capabilities, but it has been called out repeatedly for left-leaning biases and answers.
Musk told Carlson on Fox & Friends, “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. And I think this might be the best path to safety in the sense that an AI that cares about understanding the universe is unlikely to annihilate humans because we are an interesting part of the universe.”
The acceleration of these AI systems has drawn interest to competitors like Musk, who wants to offer a less “woke” partisan version to the general public.
According to Pitchbook.com, “The global generative AI market is expected to reach $426 billion in 2023,” with 58.7% of venture capital investments in natural language interfaces in 2022 going to virtual assistants, voicebots and chatbots.
Musk, along with other experts in the field, recently called for a six-month pause on the development of AI systems. He told Carlson, “AI is more dangerous than, say, mismanaged aircraft design or production maintenance or bad car production.”
“In effect, Microsoft has a very strong say, if not directly controls OpenAi at this point. So you really have an OpenAI-Microsoft situation and then a Google-DeepMind are the other two sort of heavyweights in this arena.”
The tech mogul says he hopes that creating a third option “hopefully does more good than harm.” He added that the intention of OpenAI is to do good, but it isn’t clear whether or not that is actually being achieved.
“Except that I’m worried about the fact that it’s being trained to be politically correct which is simply another way of saying untruthful things,” Musk said.
This adds new meaning to Google’s “Don’t Be Evil” motto, which was removed in 2018. The motto had been part of their code of conduct since 2000.
The Wayback Machine archive captured the following from Google’s code of conduct on April 21st, 2018, before it was removed:
“Don’t be evil.” Googlers generally apply those words to how we serve our users. But “Don’t be evil” is much more than that. Yes, it’s about providing our users unbiased access to information, focusing on their needs and giving them the best products and services that we can. But it’s also about doing the right thing more generally – following the law, acting honorably, and treating co-workers with courtesy and respect.
The Google Code of Conduct is one of the ways we put “Don’t be evil” into practice. It’s built around the recognition that everything we do in connection with our work at Google will be, and should be, measured against the highest possible standards of ethical business conduct. We set the bar that high for practical as well as aspirational reasons: Our commitment to the highest standards helps us hire great people, build great products, and attract loyal users. Trust and mutual respect among employees and users are the foundation of our success, and they are something we need to earn every day.”
On February 28th, Musk tweeted “BasedAI,” following reports that he had contacted researchers like Igor Babuschkin, who specializes in chatbots and had recently departed from Google’s subsidiary, DeepMind AI.
Concerns have been raised about the output of closed-source AI software programs, particularly in relation to disinformation being received by users.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai told 60 Minutes this week he would like to see global AI regulations put in place.
When asked what AI dominance means for the country that achieves it, Pichai answered, “It’s one of the critical technologies that will impact national security. But, over time I think it’s important to remember the technology will be available to most countries and so I think we would need to figure out global frameworks.”
Pichai also called for AI treaties, saying, “We would need that. That is my prediction over time.”
Musk’s interview with Tucker Carlson can be viewed in its entirety here.
