Elon Musk broached the idea of an alternative to ChatGPT and Google Bard back in April this year. Musk did so as he raises alarm over the misuse of artificial intelligence in the wake of the explosive launch of OpenAI's ChatGPT. Musk said there was a need to create a truth-seeking AI that can take on Microsoft's ChatGPT and Google's Bard.
Understanding the Universe
On Wednesday Musk announced the creation of a new company that cares about 'understanding the universe'. The company has been called xAI, and there are at least a dozen staffers who work in it. Musk said the new company will be led by him and will will work closely with his other front-line companies such as Twitter and Tesla.
"The goal of xAI is to understand the true nature of the universe ... ," the website of the company says.
"If it tried to understand the true nature of the universe, that's actually the best thing that I can come up with from an AI safety standpoint ... I think it is going to be pro-humanity from the standpoint that humanity is just much more interesting than not-humanity," Musk said in a Twitter Spaces event on Wednesday.
The Team
Not too many details about the new company are out in the public yet. It has been reported that, apart from Musk himself, the company will be led by Igor Babuschkin, Manuel Kroiss, Yuhuai (Tony) Wu, Christian Szegedy, Jimmy Ba, Toby Pohlen, Ross Nordeen, Kyle Kosic, Greg Yang, Guodong Zhang, and Zihang Dai.
The website says that the members of the leadership team previously worked in companies like DeepMind, OpenAI Google Research, Tesla and Microsoft Research. "We have previously worked at DeepMind, OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research, Tesla, and the University of Toronto," it says.
It also adds that the team members have contributed some of the most widely used methods in the field such as the Adam optimizer, Batch Normalization, Layer Normalization, and the discovery of adversarial examples. "We further introduced innovative techniques and analyses such as Transformer-XL, Autoformalization, the Memorizing Transformer, Batch Size Scaling, and μTransfer. We have worked on and led the development of some of the largest breakthroughs in the field including AlphaStar, AlphaCode, Inception, Minerva, GPT-3.5, and GPT-4," the website adds.
AI Moral Vacuum
This is not Musk's first brush with artificial intelligence. He was an early backer of OpenAI, having co-founded the cutting edge AI company back in 2015. However, Musk ended his association with OpenAI in 2018 to avoid issues stemming from conflict of interest with similar projects being undertaken at Tesla. In the days after the launch of OpenAI's ChatGPT, Musk also trained guns on the company, criticizing a moral vacuum that it allegedly failed to address.
He has said that OpenAI is training the chatbot to lie. He has even gone on and said that Google Founder Larry Page has not taken AI security seriously. "I'm going to start something I call 'TruthGPT,' or a maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe," he said. Musk claimed that TruthGPT would attempt to comprehend the nature of the cosmos to become the "best path to safety" that is "unlikely to annihilate humans." He described the launch as an effort to provide a third choice in addition to Google and Microsoft's existing services.
