SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) -Billionaire Elon Musk said he will launch an artificial intelligence, which he calls “TruthGPT,” in an apparent challenge to ChatGPT, the popular chatbot from OpenAI.
“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,” Musk said in an interview with FOX News Channel’s Tucker Carlson to be aired later on Monday.
“And I think this 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,” he said, according to some excerpts of the interview.
Musk did not immediately respond to Reuters’ request for comment.
Musk last month registered a firm named X.AI Corp, incorporated in Nevada, according to a state filing. The firm lists Musk as the sole director and Jared Birchall, the managing director of Musk’s family office, as a secretary.
Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015, but he stepped down from the company’s board in 2018. In 2019, he tweeted that he left OpenAI because he had to focus on Tesla and SpaceX.
He also tweeted at that time that other reasons for his departure from OpenAI were, “Tesla was competing for some of the same people as OpenAI & I didn’t agree with some of what OpenAI team wanted to do.”
Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, has also become CEO of Twitter, a social media platform he had bought for $44 billion last year.
(Reporting by Hyunjoo Jin and Sheila Dang; Editing by Chris Reese and Josie Kao)
