Elon Musk has been lobbying artificial intelligence researchers in recent weeks to set up a new lab to develop an alternative to ChatGPT, the popular chatbot developed by startup OpenAI, according to the initiative. A conversation, according to two people with first-hand knowledge of and a third party briefed on the effort.
In recent months, Musk has repeatedly criticized OpenAI for installing safeguards that prevent ChatGPT from generating text that could offend users. Musk, who co-founded OpenAI in 2015 but has since cut ties with the startup, suggested last year, and said OpenAI’s technology was an example of “training to wake up AI”. His comments imply that rival chatbots have fewer restrictions on divisive topics than ChatGPT and Microsoft’s recently launched related chatbots.
To spearhead this effort, Musk has hired Igor Babuschkin, a researcher who recently left Alphabet’s DeepMind AI division to specialize in the kinds of machine learning models that power chatbots like ChatGPT. Babushkin said in an interview that building a chatbot with less content protection was not Musk’s goal.
