New Blood
Multi-hyphenate tech guy Elon Musk is apparently seeking to rival OpenAI, the firm he co-founded and subsequently left, with his own anti-“woke” artificial intelligence.
According to a scoop by The Information, the Twitter, Tesla, and SpaceX CEO has been reaching out to AI researchers about building a competitor to ChatGPT after publicly criticizing the chatbot built by the firm he left in 2018 over apparent ideological differences.
The report named Igor Babuschkin, a machine learning expert who until last week worked at Google DeepMind and confirmed to The Information that he’d left his former employer, as the potential chief of the proposed AI research firm. Babuschkin told the site that he has not yet signed any deal with Musk, but that he’s interested in working with him.
Mind Virus
While Musk has at times lauded the power of the game-changing chatbot from his old AI group since its release last November, he has also repeatedly taken to Twitter to trash it, especially for being “woke.”
“The danger of training AI to be woke — in other words, lie — is deadly,” Musk tweeted in December.
He took those criticisms to the next level last week when he castigated OpenAI itself.
“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, maximum-profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft,” Musk claimed. “Not what I intended at all.”
While we can’t speak to the veracity of Musk’s boast that he was the person who named OpenAI, he’s not wrong to point out that the firm he cofounded in 2015 did indeed recently enter into a reportedly multi-billion-dollar deal with Microsoft that seems to have resulted in the tech giant’s disastrous Bing AI chatbot.