Elon Musk Increases Focus on A.I. Despite Warning of Dangers
Elon Musk, the billionaire entrepreneur, has been known for his contradictory views on whether artificial intelligence (A.I.) will benefit or destroy humanity. In December, he expressed his concerns and frustrations regarding the development of A.I., specifically with OpenAI, the start-up behind ChatGPT, the popular chatbot.
He had discovered that OpenAI was licensing data from Twitter for around $2 million per year to develop the chatbot. Mr. Musk believed that OpenAI was not paying Twitter enough for their data. Therefore, he decided to cut OpenAI off from Twitter’s data.
Since then, Mr. Musk has enhanced his own A.I. activities while publicly discussing the potential hazards of the technology. Currently, he is in discussions with Jimmy Ba, a researcher, and professor at the University of Toronto, to create a new A.I. firm called X.AI. He has employed top A.I. experts from Google's DeepMind to work at Tesla and has discussed creating a rival chatbot to ChatGPT that generates politically charged content without any restrictions.
Despite being committed to competing with OpenAI, which he helped create as a non-profit organization in 2015, he has grown disillusioned with them as the company has shifted its focus to building technology that, in Mr. Musk's opinion, takes sides in political and social debates, and is no longer operating as a non-profit.
Mr. Musk has been an early investor in DeepMind, a London start-up that aimed to create artificial general intelligence (A.G.I.). He became hesitant to build A.I himself, and in a 2014 aerospace event at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he said while answering audience questions, “I think we need to be very careful about artificial intelligence. With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon.”
In 2015, he founded OpenAI as a non-profit organization with a billion-dollar investment commitment from himself and others. The lab promised to "open source" all its research and software code to the world to mitigate the threat of harmful A.I., with the goal of allowing everyone access to A.I. technology.
However, as OpenAI's technology progressed to create ChatGPT, it was discovered that openly sharing its software could be harmful. Individuals and organizations could potentially create and distribute false information more efficiently and quickly using A.I. So many individuals at OpenAI believed that the lab should keep some of its ideas and code from the public.
Mr. Musk resigned from OpenAI’s board in 2018, partly because of his growing conflicts of interest with the organization. By then, he had started working on his A.I. project at Tesla, the Autopilot, which is driver-assistance technology that automatically steers, accelerates, and brakes cars on highways.
Last month, Mr. Musk renewed his concerns regarding the potential hazards of A.I. and called for regulators to protect society from A.I., even though his car company, Tesla, had used A.I. systems technology that had been involved in fatal crashes.
Therefore, Mr. Musk's approach to A.I. is to do it himself. According to individuals who have discussed these matters with him, he believes that his A.I. efforts offer safer and better alternatives than those of his competitors.
