Elon Musk has communicated with some AI researchers about launching a possible AI lab that could build a competitor to OpenAI's ChatGPT, sources told The Information.
Musk co-founded OpenAI with Sam Altman and others in 2015 before stepping down from its board in 2018.
- Now, Musk has reportedly held talks with AI experts in recent weeks about launching a project and an AI chatbot similar to ChatGPT.
- The talks included AI researcher Igor Babuschkin, who recently left his post as a senior staff research engineer at Alphabet's DeepMind AI lab.
- Babuschkin, who was also a member of OpenAI's technical staff in 2020-21, told The Information that he has not officially joined Musk's project, which remains in the early stages.
- Babuschkin said he would like "to work with Elon on something in the LLM space," referring to large language models.
- ChatGPT, OpenAI's new experimental browser-based chatbot, launched to the public in late November. Shortly after, Musk called ChatGPT "scary good."
- However, the billionaire has since expressed some criticisms of ChatGPT and Microsoft-backed OpenAI.
- In December, Musk responded to a tweet thread about "turning off" GPT's "woke" settings. Musk wrote, "The danger of training AI to be woke – in other words, lie – is deadly."
- Musk said it is "concerning" that ChatGPT said it was never morally permissible to say a racial slur, even if it would disarm a bomb that could kill millions of people.
- Musk recently said he named and formed OpenAI as an open-source, non-profit company that would be a "counterweight to Google."
- However, he argued that regarding OpenAI, "now it has become a closed source, maximum-profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft," which was not his intention.
