In a shocking development, The Information released a report on the 27th of February, citing that Elon musk, after acquiring Twitter, Tesla, and SpaceX CEO, is keen on launching Open AI ChatGPT’s competitor. This is after Musk’s discussions with Artificial Intelligence experts in ‘recent weeks.’ The billionaire reportedly approached Igor Babuschkin, who departed Alphabet’s DeepMind AI unit. According to The Information, Musk and Babuschkin are in the early stages of assembling a team to pursue AI research with ‘no concrete plan to develop specific products.’ However, in an interview with ‘The Information, ‘ Babuschkin added that he has not officially signed onto the Musk initiative. This new AI-center project is expected to feature a chatbot with fewer speech restrictions and could be integrated into Twitter, the social media company that Musk recently bought.
The move comes after Elon Musk publically criticized Open AI in December last year for ‘training AI to be woke.’ He called out OpenAI after users discovered it has guardrails in place for its ChatGPT service for filtering out harmful content from the data to make ChatGPT less violent, sexist, and racist. He tweeted on February 17, ”OpenAI was created as an open source (which is why I named it “Open” AI), non-profit company to serve as a counterweight to Google, but now it has become a closed source, the maximum-profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft. Not what I intended at all.” Remember, Musk co-founded OpenAI with Silicon Valley investor Sam Altman in 2015 as a nonprofit startup and left its board in 2018 over alleged ‘ideological differences.’
ChatGPT gained immense popularity after its release in November 2022, compelling tech giants to jump into the AI race. On February 7, the Chief Executive of Google parent Alphabet Inc. announced the launch of ‘Bard,’ Google’s ChatGPT-like conversational Artificial Intelligence chatbot. ‘Bard’ will generate fresh, high-quality textual responses from the web to the questions posed by users. The AI tool can also be used to simplify complex topics. Google’s new service also comes amid announcements by rival group Microsoft Corp. about its use of Artificial intelligence services developed by OpenAI. Both Tech giants are about to go head-to-head in a battle of Artificial Intelligence tools. On the other hand, China’s Baidu is also set to launch a “revolutionary” version of its popular search engine and is currently working on Ernie Bot to rival ChatGPT.
Musk hasn’t responded to The Information’s report yet. However, he tweeted about AI on February 26, “Having a bit of AI existential angst today… But, all things considered about AGI [artificial general intelligence] existential angst, I would prefer to be alive now to witness AGI than be alive in the past and not.”