Some will say that he is full of contradictions, but he will undoubtedly answer that it is more complex than that.
Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk has been calling for several years for the regulation of artificial intelligence, a technology he considers more dangerous for our civilization than nuclear weapons.
He recently called on the government to regulate it, after the worldwide success of ChatGPT, a conversational chatbot which provides elaborate humanlike answers to requests.
"Good news! AI regulation will be far more important than it may seem today," Musk applauded on April 13, following a report saying that powerful Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) was laying groundwork for the U.S. Congress to regulate AI.
A Moratorium
Last month, Musk went so far as to sign a petition with others, calling for a six-month or longer moratorium on the development of powerful new AI tools. The signatories of this petition, launched on March 22, believe that the pause would provide time to put in place safety standards and to determine the dangers and risks that some of the most advanced AI tools would pose to our civilization.
The letter notably targets the next generation of technology from OpenAI, the Microsoft-funded startup, which developed the very famous ChatGPT. This next technology is GPT-5. Currently, OpenAI is on GPT-4 technology and has already indicated that they have not started training GPT-5 yet.
GPT-4 is already an advanced stage of artificial general intelligence, or AGI, which refers to AI systems that can emulate humans -- basically, chatbots or robots that can perform any tasks that humans can do and even do them better.
The next generation of AI tools will do even more, critics have warned.
"Contemporary AI systems are now becoming human-competitive at general tasks, and we must ask ourselves: Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth?" said the open letter, titled "Pause Giant AI Experiments," that Musk and 26,000 other people have signed at last check. "Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones? Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us?"
"Should we risk loss of control of our civilization? Such decisions must not be delegated to unelected tech leaders. Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable," the letter said.
X.AI Corp
This debate has not discouraged companies. Microsoft (MSFT) launched a version of Binge, its search engine, integrating ChatGPT. Google (GOOGL) launched Bard, a rival to ChatGPT. Meta Platforms (META), Amazon (AMZN), Adobe (ADBE), and Salesforce (CRM) introduced advanced AI tools.
"A race starts today,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in February. "We’re going to move, and move fast.”
Musk does not want to be left behind. Despite his warnings about the dangers of AI, he has just created a new company specializing in artificial intelligence. This company is called X.AI Corp and is domiciled in Nevada, according to official documents. The Wall Street Journal was the first to report on this company.
Musk is currently the sole director of the company while Jared Birchall, who heads the Musk family office, is the secretary. The startup was incorporated on March 9, according to the filing.
The creation of this company is part of an offensive by the billionaire to create a rival to OpenAI, of which he had been a founder but had to distance himself after he lost a power war with Sam Altman, the current CEO.
Mush has been recruiting AI researchers. His biggest success is the recruitment of Igor Babuschkin, a scientist at DeepMind, an AI lab owned by Alphabet. Babuschkin is supposed to lead Musk's AI lab, according to The Information.
The billionaire's efforts to poach OpenAI employees have not been successful, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Musk has a complex relationship with AI. He is an avid fan: Tesla (TSLA), the automaker of which he is one of the founders and the CEO, already uses AI with its advanced driver assistance system Full Self Driving (FSD). Musk made the first financial contribution to OpenAI.
On the other hand, the billionaire believes that ChatGPT and other chatbots developed by big tech have a political bias. For him, they advance the liberal agenda. He therefore wants to create more neutral and truth-seeking AI models but has not yet articulated what he means by this.
Musk has used the letter X for his businesses for many years. He has repeatedly indicated that he intends to create an everything super app called X and changed the official name of Twitter to X Corp, whose parent company is X Holdings Corp.
One of the very first companies the billionaire co-founded was X.com, an online bank which later merged with Confinity Inc., a software company which developed an easy payment system, to form PayPal in March 2000. Confinity was co-founded by billionaire Peter Thiel.
