Elon Musk to launch ‘TruthGPT’ after warning of danger of ‘annihilation’

Elon Musk is working on an alternative to OpenAI’s popular chatbot ChatGPT that is a “maximum truth-seeking AI” he calls “TruthGPT”.

In an interview on Monday with Fox News host Tucker Carlson, the Twitter chief said the AI will try to “understand the nature of the universe” and might be the “best path to safety” as it is “unlikely to annihilate humans”.

The multibillionaire criticised OpenAI – a software non-profit he helped found – for training its AI ChatGPT “to lie”, claiming the company has become a “closed source”, “for-profit” organisation that is “closely allied with Microsoft”.

“What we need is TruthGPT,” the Tesla and SpaceX chief had tweeted earlier in February.

He also accused Google co-founder Larry Page of not taking AI seriously, in line with his previous warning to the industry along with a group of AI experts, calling for a pause in development of such systems due to their potential risks to society.

In the open letter shared last month, experts called for researchers to stop working on the development of new AI systems for the next six months, warning that if they do not, governments would need to step in.

The letter, signed by academics in the field and AI industry leaders including Mr Musk and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, warned that while the positive possibilities of AI are significant, people could face a more difficult situation.

Experts warned that laboratories across the world are “locked in an out-of-control” race to develop and deploy ever more powerful AI “no one – not even their creators – can understand, predict, or reliably control”.

“This pause should be public and verifiable, and include all key actors. If such a pause cannot be enacted quickly, governments should step in and institute a moratorium,” the authors noted.

Insider reported last week, however, that the Tesla titan is also secretly working on an AI project at Twitter.

The report noted that Mr Musk has already poached two AI scientists from firms like DeepMind and has invested in 10,000 graphics processing units for the company.

This could likely be linked to the Twitter chief’s new start-up dubbed X.AI that he incorporated in Nevada last month.

Last week, documents filed with the US state revealed Mr Musk had merged Twitter with another entity called X Corp, touted as the future parent company for all of his companies, including Neuralink, SpaceX, Tesla and The Boring Company, and may also signal his plan to turn Twitter into an “everything app”.

Yet, the Tesla chief has maintained that AI technology development is dangerous with the “potential of civilizational destruction”.

“AI is more dangerous than say mismanaged aircraft design or production maintenance or bad car production,” he told Carlson.