Elon Musk Approaching AI Researchers to setup a Research Lab for developing his own AI Chat
Elon Musk reportedly has been approaching artificial intelligence researchers in recent weeks with an eye toward setting up a research lab to develop his own AI Chat.
The move to develop his own AI Chat stems from his dissatisfaction with the safeguards OpenAI has included in ChatGPT to prevent it from producing text that might offend users, according to a report in The Information.
Musk, and some conservative commentators, have also accused OpenAI of training ChatGPT to be “woke.”
Writing for the National Review in January, Nate Hochman declared he’d found a built-in ideological bias in ChatGPT.
“It’s not clear if this was characteristic of ChatGPT from the outset or if it’s a recent reform to the algorithm, but it appears that the crackdowns on ‘misinformation’ that we’ve seen across technology platforms in recent years — which often veer into more brazen efforts to suppress or silence viewpoints that dissent from progressive orthodoxy — is now a feature of ChatGPT, too,” he wrote.
Avoiding Controversy
Will Duffield, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute, states that ChatGPT avoids controversies.
“Woke is the wrong framing,” Duffield said in an interview with the media.
“OpenAI’s chatbot, and DALL-E as well, has been tuned to avoid controversial subjects,” he continued. “That doesn’t mean they’ve been tuned to be woke. In avoiding controversy, they mirror what society as a whole has deemed controversial.”
He further explained by narrating an example to ask ChatGPT to write a poem about Biden and Trump. ChatGPT will choose to write the poem about Biden but not about Trump.
“That isn’t because somebody at OpenAI tuned the model to avoid Trump, but because Trump is a controversial figure,” he said. “If you read everything written about Biden and Trump over the last 10 years, you’re going to walk away with the impression that Trump is more controversial.”
Musk Might Deliver Transparency
Mark N. Vena is the president and principal analyst with SmartTech Research in San Jose, California. He argued that multiple examples have been reported in the media about apparent wokeness in OpenAI’s technology.
“In all fairness, OpenAI is still very much in a testing phase, and given some of the negative market feedback on its alleged wokeness, I suspect OpenAI will dial it back over time,” Vena told to a media group.
Further, he added that if Musk became part of the AI, it could be a good thing for the technology.
“Given the management approach that he’s brought to Twitter, his focus on transparency could be a good thing,” he said.
“I’d expect him to focus on being highly transparent around the algorithms that Twitter might utilize with their own ChatGPT implementation, and you might see him promote a strong code of conduct,” he continued.
“I think we should be open-minded about the changes he might bring to a ChatGPT play,” Vena added.
AI Traffic Magnet
As observed by Ross Rubin, the news of Musk taking over AI chat business could benefit Twitter. Ross Rubin is the principal analyst in Reticle Research which is a consumer technology advisory firm in New York.
“ChatGPT has become an incredible traffic magnet, and when you’re in the attention game, like Twitter, that’s impossible to ignore. You have to respond to that,” he said.
A Musk AI might also benefit from his relationship with Twitter. “He’s got Twitter’s data, which might be an interesting corpus of information to train AI on,” Duffield said.
“If Musk really wants to differentiate his AI product, he should use a model that users can run on their own machines and set their own weights and biases,” he added. “That kind of freedom will ultimately be most important in the AI space.”
