Elon Musk joins in ‘dangerous’ race to create chatbots

The billionaire boss of Tesla is working on an artificial intelligence start-up to rival OpenAI, the ChatGPT maker.

Elon Musk wants to rival ChatGPT and its maker, OpenAI. Picture: Reuters/The Times

Elon Musk is working on an artificial intelligence start-up to rival OpenAI, the ChatGPT maker, in Silicon Valley’s race to build AI systems.

The billionaire boss of Tesla, the electric carmaker, and SpaceX, the spacecraft and satellite operator, is assembling a team of artificial intelligence researchers and engineers, according to the Financial Times.

ChatGPT is a large language model trained on billions of words on the internet which is then finetuned by human feedback. It identifies patterns in text and can write in a sophisticated way, as well as produce computer code.

Musk, 51, who bought Twitter for $US44 billion ($65.6 billion) last year, is in discussions with several investors in SpaceX and Tesla about putting money into his new venture.

“A bunch of people are investing in it … it’s real and they are excited about it,” the report said.

Musk’s move to enter the AI market will surprise analysts after he called for a pause on development of GPT-style models over safety concerns. Artificial intelligence experts and industry executives called for a six-month pause in developing systems more powerful than OpenAI’s GPT-4, citing potential risks to society.

In an interview with Tucker Carlson of Fox News to be broadcast on Monday, Musk will say: “AI is more dangerous than, say, mismanaged aircraft design or bad car production … in the sense that it has the potential, however small one may regard that probability, but it is non-trivial, it has the potential of civilisation destruction.”

Musk and OpenAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The Times