Elon Musk says he’s working on ‘TruthGPT,’ a ‘maximum truth-seeking AI’ to challenge ChatGPT and counter AI ‘bias’

In February, Elon Musk said he was exploring the development of an alternative to ChatGPT. The billionaire revealed he had contacted AI researchers to start work on the project. To spearhead the effort, The Information reported that Musk has been recruiting Igor Babuschkin, a researcher who recently left Alphabet’s DeepMind AI unit and specializes in the kind of machine-learning models that power chatbots like ChatGPT.

Two months later, Musk announced on Monday he’s launching an artificial intelligence (AI) platform that he calls “TruthGPT” to challenge ChatGPT and counter AI ‘bias.’

“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 tonight.

“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,” Musk added.

In the past few weeks, Musk has criticized Microsoft-backed OpenAI, the firm behind chatbot sensation ChatGPT, of “training the AI to lie” and said OpenAI has now become a “closed source”, “for-profit” organization “closely allied with Microsoft.”

Late last year, Musk also suggested that OpenAI’s technology was an example of “training AI to be woke.”

The danger of training AI to be woke – in other words, lie – is deadly

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 16, 2022

Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015 with Sam Altman and 20 others with the mission of developing and promoting friendly artificial intelligence, with the goal of advancing and ensuring the beneficial use of AI in society. In addition, both Musk and Sam were motivated in part to address the concerns about existential risk from artificial general intelligence.

But in 2018, Musk stepped down as the chairman due to a conflict of interest. A year later, Microsoft announced invested $1 billion in OpenAI. Fast forward four years later, OpenAI shocked the world when it launched its ChatGPT, a dialogue-based AI chat interface for its GPT-3 family of large language models.

The ChatGPT soared in popularity after its release on November 30, 2022. The OpenAI’s AI-powered chatbot could do virtually everything from writing poetry and correcting coding mistakes with detailed examples to generating AI art prompts. It can even explain the worst-case time complexity of the bubble sort algorithm.