Separately, Musk has incorporated a new business called X.AI Corp, according to a Nevada business filing. The website of the Nevada secretary of state’s office says the business was formed on March 9 and lists Musk as its director and his longtime adviser, Jared Birchall, as secretary.
Musk has for many years expressed strong opinions about artificial intelligence and has dismissed other tech leaders, including Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates, for having what he has described as a “limited” understanding of the field.
Musk was an early investor in OpenAI – the startup behind ChatGPT – and co-chaired its board when it was founded in 2015 as a non-profit AI research lab. But he lasted only a few years, resigning in early 2018 in a move that the San Francisco startup tied to Tesla’s work on building automated driving systems.
“As Tesla continues to become more focused on AI, this will eliminate a potential future conflict for Elon,” OpenAI said in a February 2018 blog post.
“I came up with the name and the concept,” Musk told Carlson, lamenting that OpenAI was now closely allied with Microsoft and was no longer a non-profit.
Musk elaborated on his departure in 2019, saying it was also related to his need to focus on engineering problems at Tesla and some differences of opinion with OpenAI’s leaders. It was “just better to part ways on good terms”, he said.
“Tesla was competing for some of same people as OpenAI & I didn’t agree with some of what OpenAI team wanted to do,” Musk tweeted, without specifying.
There have been questions about the quality of Tesla’s AI systems. US safety regulators last month announced an investigation into a fatal crash involving a Tesla suspected of using an automated driving system when it ran into a parked fire engine in California.
The investigation is part of a larger one by the agency into multiple instances of cars using Tesla’s Autopilot system crashing into parked emergency vehicles that are attending other crashes. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has become more aggressive in pursuing safety problems with Teslas in the past year, announcing multiple recalls and investigations.
In the year after Musk resigned from the board, OpenAI was still far away from working on ChatGPT but publicly unveiled the first generation of its GPT system, on which ChatGPT is founded, and began a major shift to incorporate itself as a for-profit business.
By 2020, Musk was tweeting that “OpenAI should be more open” while noting that he had “no control & only very limited insight” into it.
At times, he has been complimentary. In the days after the November 30 release of ChatGPT, Musk tweeted to OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman that it was “scary good” and complained that news media were not widely covering it because “ChatGPT is not a far-left cause”.
Since then, however, Musk has repeatedly highlighted examples that he says show left-wing bias or censorship. Like other chatbots, ChatGPT has filters that try to prevent it from spewing out toxic or offensive answers.
