Elon Musk Seeks to Build 'Trustworthy' and 'Reliable' Chatbot to Rival ChatGPT

 It appears that Elon Musk is forming a new research lab to develop an alternative to ChatGPT, the popular chatbot developed by OpenAI, which Musk co-founded but left in 2018 due to disagreements in the company’s direction. Musk has been a vocal critic of OpenAI and ChatGPT, calling the chatbot "concerning" and "woke" for its content filters meant to mitigate against bias. Musk believes that the filters are making the chatbot biased against conservatives.

Musk's new chatbot project is still in its early stages, with no concrete plan to develop specific projects. According to Igor Babuschkin, a researcher who just left Google’s DeepMind AI unit and has been recruited by Musk to lead the building of his rival chatbot, the goal is to improve the reasoning abilities and the factualness of language models, making sure the model’s responses are more trustworthy and reliable.

However, some AI ethics researchers argue that content filters are still not enough to protect against harms, especially towards marginalized communities. ChatGPT has been known to regurgitate hate speech embedded in its training data, including telling a user that people from North Korea, Syria, Iran, and Sudan should be tortured.

Musk has been sending out cryptic tweets in apparent reference to this project, including one with the term "BasedAI," which is a common term used to describe something that conforms to right-wing values. Some experts believe that Musk working on his own chatbot would merely be part of a "hype cycle," if it simply recreates ChatGPT, trained on the same sort of data, but with tweaks.

In addition to his criticisms of ChatGPT, Musk has also criticized OpenAI's shift to being a for-profit company, saying that it has deviated from its original founding principles of being a non-profit organization that would freely share its code. OpenAI's generative AI is now a big business that includes a multi-billion dollar Microsoft partnership.

It seems that Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, wants to add his own spin-off to the arms race that OpenAI initiated with the development of its own chatbots, as companies like Google and Baidu also try to compete in this space.