Elon Musk says he is working on his own artificial intelligence, "Truth GPT"

Europe 1 with AFP 09:11, April 18, 2023

Elon Musk said Monday he is working on the creation of his own artificial intelligence, a project nicknamed "TruthGPT", responsible for "seeking the maximum truth" and competing with other existing software, which he says does not include enough safeguards.

"An AI that seeks maximum truth"

"I'm going to launch something called Truth GPT or an AI that seeks the maximum truth and tries to understand the nature of the universe," Elon Musk detailed in an interview on the American channel FoxNews. The boss of Twitter, Tesla, SpaceX and Neuralink believes that this is the "best way" to ensure the safety of humanity, because "an AI that cares about understanding the universe is not likely to annihilate humans, because we are an interesting part of the universe."

According to him, this ideal AI would act a bit like humans, who aspire "to protect the habitat" of chimpanzees, while they would have the ability to "hunt and kill them all". Various specialized media had already reported for a few weeks that Elon Musk is investing in the field of artificial intelligence. In March, he founded a new company specializing in this field, called X.AI and based in Nevada.

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Compete with ChatGPT

According to the Financial Times, this new entity must compete with OpenAI, the Californian start-up that has designed ChatGPT, a next-generation AI capable of interacting with humans and producing all kinds of texts on demand. The success of this interface since its release at the end of November has launched a real race for this high-potential technology.

In February, Elon Musk had already let his intentions shine through by tweeting: "What we need is TruthGPT." He co-founded OpenAI in 2015, before leaving the company in 2018. He has since criticized the company, saying in a tweet last December that it trains AI to be "woke" (term designating a fringe of the American left), that is to say to "lie".

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On Monday, Elon Musk, who signed a recent call to pause research on next-generation AI, said the technology "has the potential to destroy civilization" and called for creating a "regulator" for the industry. According to the Financial Times, the entrepreneur recently recruited Igor Babuschkin and Manuel Kroiss, both of whom worked through DeepMind, the AI arm of Alphabet (Google's parent company).

He also reportedly bought some 10,000 GPUs — computers needed to train language models, the foundation for generative AI systems.