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Billionaire Elon Musk has expanded his horizons once again and entered the AI arms race, announcing a new AI rival to ChatGPT.
The artificial intelligence (AI) company, which Musk plans to name xAI, will be led by Musk alongside a team of AI experts from Microsoft, Google, SpaceX, and Tesla, as well as ChatGPT’s creator OpenAI, and many more, all to meet the goal of “[understanding] the true nature of the universe”.
Musk coined the idea of starting his own AI company earlier in the year, saying he wanted to create a tool called “TruthGPT”, after he criticised ChatGPT for having AI bias and calling it “woke”.
The name xAI, while seeming to follow the same naming techniques Musk uses for his children, refers to the abbreviation for explained artificial intelligence, or artificial intelligence where humans can understand how decisions are made. This could be a stab at ChatGPT, referring to its decision making being wrong or biased and containing hallucinations.
Advising the company is Center for AI Safety (CAIS) director Dan Hendrycks. Musk and Hendrycks have seen eye to eye on the dangers of AI before, with Musk saying that AI could pose existential risks to humanity. Hendrycks, earlier this year, organised an open letter saying the same thing.
The one-sentence open letter by the CAIS director said: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”
CAIS outlined a number of ways in which the human race could be wiped out at the hands of AI, such as the potential for widespread misinformation to derail society and AI tools being weaponised to create weapons of mass destruction and complete dependence.
Despite being a rival to Musk and his new AI venture, OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman has expressed his own concerns surrounding AI and its development.
“I think if this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong, and we want to be quite vocal about that; we want to work with the government to prevent that from happening,” said Altman speaking in front of US Congress.
Altman said that while generative AI has the potential to change the world for the better, government regulation will be necessary for curbing poor and dangerous development.
“We think that regulatory intervention by governments will be critical to mitigate the risks of increasingly powerful models,” he said.
“For a very new technology, we need a new framework.”
Members of the Senate judiciary committee were also extremely concerned with the risks that AI was creating.
Senator Richard Blumenthal listed a number of concerns, including the purposeful spread of disinformation, impersonation, deepfakes, harassment of women, and housing discrimination.
“For me, perhaps the biggest nightmare is the looming new industrial revolution, the displacement of millions of workers,” said Blumenthal.
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