Elon Musk Plans 'TruthGPT' AI Designed To Understand The Universe

Elon Musk is trying to carve his own path toward creating a safer AI, something that won't annihilate humanity. In an interview with Fox News' Tucker Carlson, Musk announced that he will build something called TruthGPT, which is a not-so-subtle dig at ChatGPT, the buzzy conversational AI created by OpenAI. This isn't the first time that Musk has name-dropped TruthGPT. "What we need is TruthGPT," Musk tweeted back in February. During the interview, Musk vented his frustration at how the current wave of AI products is not staying loyal to their training material and claimed that TruthGPT will avoid those pitfalls. 

"What's happening is that they are training the AI to lie. It's bad," Musk told Carlson. The Tesla chief claims that TruthGPT will be "a maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe." Musk equated TruthGPT's creation with being the path toward safety when it comes to AI development. Notably, the Twitter boss recently signed an open letter, alongside other industry tycoons and scientists, asking for a six-month pause on the development of advanced AI products, citing safety risks.

Musk's alarmist views on unchecked AI development were in full swing during the conversation. At one point, he claimed that AI has the potential for civilizational destruction. However, Musk seems confident that the approach he has in mind for TruthGPT will avoid that fate. Explaining the benefits of TruthGPT, Musk reasoned that "an AI that cares about understanding the universe is unlikely to annihilate the humans because we are an interesting part of the universe." Unfortunately, Musk didn't go into detail about other salient features of TruthGPT and when he plans to release it.

But it appears that Musk has already laid the foundations. Earlier this month, it was revealed that Musk has set up his own AI company called X.AI Corp and has been on a hiring spree for experts in the field to create an OpenAI rival. Now, there's some deep history between Musk and OpenAI. The billionaire was one of the first backers of the non-profit AI lab and even tried to buy it at one point, but the proposal was rejected. Instead, it was Microsoft that poured billions of dollars into the company over the years and has already commercialized OpenAI's tech.