What happened: Twitter owner Elon Musk said he's pursuing "TruthGPT," an alternative to ChatGPT he described as a "maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe."
Details: During a Fox News interview, Musk said he thinks TruthGPT represents "the best path to safety" since an AI program "that cares about understanding the universe is unlikely to annihilate humans because we are an interesting part of the universe." The CEO said he would try to develop "a third option" in the AI offerings already unleashed by Google and Microsoft-backed OpenAI.
Why it matters: On a bigger scale, Musk expressed concerns that ChatGPT "is being trained to be politically correct." Recently, he was among the thousands of people to sign an open letter calling for a six-month pause on training AI systems more advanced than GPT-4. He claimed that one path to "AI dystopia" is training the technology "to be deceptive."
What the numbers say: In a recent YouGov poll , 54% of American respondents said they don't think AI can ever learn to be moral. Only 22% said they believe machines could learn to exhibit morality. Meanwhile, another YouGov poll found that 18% of U.S. adult citizens are very concerned and 28% are somewhat concerned about AI ending the human race. AI ranked fifth out of nine potential threats of extinction, suggesting that the public remains very concerned about AI's impacts on humanity.
