Elon Musk, who co-founded OpenAI but left the company in 2018 after losing a power struggle to its current chief executive, elaborated on his current ambitions for artificial intelligence in a television interview.
“I’m going to start something which I call ‘Truth GPT’ or a maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe,” Mr. Musk said in an interview on Fox News Channel’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight.” The first part of the interview aired Monday, with a second part scheduled to air Tuesday night.
According to the WSJ, Mr. Musk recently created a new artificial intelligence company called X.AI Corp., according to a Nevada state filing. In the past few months, Mr. Musk has been recruiting researchers with the goal of creating a rival effort to OpenAI, the artificial intelligence company that launched the viral chatbot ChatGPT, The Wall Street Journal has reported.
Mr. Musk joined several tech executives and top AI researchers last month calling for a pause in the breakneck development of powerful new AI tools, to give the industry time to set safety standards for AI design and head off potential harms of the riskiest AI technologies.
Understanding the nature of the universe “might be the best path to safety, in the sense that an AI that cares about understanding the universe, it is unlikely to annihilate humans because we are an interesting part of the universe,” Mr. Musk said in the interview.
Fox News parent Fox Corp. and Journal parent News Corp share common ownership. Mr. Musk has expressed concerns about ChatGPT offering what critics have called politically biased answers. He tweeted in February: “What we need is TruthGPT.”
During the interview, Mr. Musk reiterated his support for government regulation of AI, citing safety concerns. He said he thinks a regulatory body should solicit opinions from people in the industry and propose rules.
AI could be more dangerous than mismanaged aircraft or automobile design, Mr. Musk said. He added, “It has the potential—however small one may regard that probability, but it is non-trivial—it has the potential of civilizational destruction.”
Mr. Musk also spoke about his tenure so far at Twitter, the social-media platform that he acquired last year in a deal valued at $44 billion. He said it remains to be seen whether his acquisition was a financially smart move.
