Elon Musk has launched an artificial intelligence (AI) company to challenge ChatGPT creator OpenAI, which the billionaire tech mogul has accused of being “woke”.

On Wednesday, xAI said the goal of the new company would be to “understand the true nature of the universe”.

“What are the most fundamental unanswered questions?” xAI said on Twitter, which is owned by Musk.

Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, said in a tweet that his company would seek to “understand reality”.

xAI’s staff includes former employees of OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Tesla, DeepMind and the University of Toronto, according to the company’s website.

Dan Hendrycks, the director of the Center for AI Safety, is advising the company, according to its website. Hendrycks earlier this year organised an open letter warning that AI could pose existential risks to humanity, a concern echoed by Musk.

Musk helped to co-found OpenAI in 2015 but left the San Francisco-based startup in 2018 over what he has described as a conflict of interest related to his work on AI at electric carmaker Tesla.

Musk, who has taken aim at the “woke mind virus”, has since accused the firm’s groundbreaking language bot ChatGPT of being biased in favour of left-wing and politically correct views.

Since buying Twitter for $44bn in October, Musk, a self-described free speech absolutist, has loosened moderation rules and reinstated previously banned right-wing accounts, which critics say has led to a surge in hate speech and harassment on the platform.

In April, Musk expressed his intention to launch a rival chatbot called TruthGPT.

Musk told former Fox News host Tucker Carlson in an interview that the new chatbot would be a “maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe”.

Source: Al Jazeera 

BDST: 0820 HRS, JULY 13, 2023
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