Elon Musk challenged ChatGPT with a new product: TruthGPT. The tech entrepreneur wants to solve the biggest challenge artificial intelligence development currently face.
After Elon Musk’s plea to stop AI development for six months, the tech entrepreneur decided to take matters into his own hands. This week, the Tesla, SpaceX and Twitter CEO announced the development of his own artificial intelligence software: TruthGPT.
In his words, artificial intelligence has the potential of destroying humanity and it needs to be regulated before it’s too late. His calls for regulation, however, did not go as far as data collection, a serious problem that OpenAI is facing with EU lawmakers.
In Musk’s opinion, AI is a tool that spreads fake news and dangerous propaganda, something that could undermine the democratic process of any nation.
Therefore, TruthGPT will be the first artificial intelligence software to seek for the true nature of the universe, as Musk said. “I think this might be the best path to safety in the sense that an AI that cares about understanding the universe is unlikely to annihilate humans because we are an interesting part of the universe,” Musk said in an interview with Tucker Carlson.
A few weeks ago, Elon Musk registered a new firm called X.AI which is supposedly working on the new software right now.
Artificial Intelligence’s unreliability
Whether Musk is correct or not, it is true that artificial intelligence’s biggest challenge is reliability. In fact, both Microsoft and Google are currently banging their heads to the wall in order to fix this major issue.
ChatGPT is capable of generating text following just a few prompts. An amazing technology, to be sure, but the answers it gives are often incomplete, inaccurate or plainly false.
Given that Microsoft, currently the parent company of ChatGPT’s developer OpenAI, and Google are trying to integrate these softwares with their search engines, reliability is their first priority.
Google tried to enter the AI competition with Bard, a text-generator similar to ChatGPT. In the words of Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai, Bard could have integrated the vast amount of information in the hands of Google with the creativity of ChatGPT.
When first presented, Bard was asked “What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope can I tell my 9-year old about?” Bard replied, as confident as a college professor, that the telescope produced the first picture of a planet outside the Solar System.
This reply, though it sounds correct, is completely wrong. The first picture of an exoplanet was taken in 2004, 17 years before the James Webb telescope was launched.
This mistake resulted in a $100 billion loss in Google’s evaluation, and nothing has been heard of Bard since then.
Essentially, AI does not look like the menace Elon Musk warned against. At least for the moment.
