Musk to launch AI startup to compete with OpenAI and Google
Christopher Hutton
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Elon Musk has begun plans to launch a new artificial intelligence startup to compete with OpenAI in the race to commercialize AI for the public.
Musk is assembling a series of AI technicians and researchers to begin the startup, according to the Financial Times. He is also speaking with several investors at Tesla and SpaceX to have them put money into the startup. The billionaire also acquired over 10,000 graphics processing units, the tools required to power the large language models behind the chatbots that have gained massive attention in recent months. Musk is making the investments just weeks after signing a letter asking AI creators to pause training of the software.
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“A bunch of people are investing in it. … It’s real, and they are excited about it,” a person familiar with the matter said.
Musk was one of the initial investors in OpenAI when it was founded in 2015. Still, he sold his stake to Microsoft in 2018 due to a “future conflict of interest” related to his role at Tesla and the car company’s development of self-driving car software.
The billionaire slammed the company in February when it received a $10 billion investment from Microsoft. OpenAI has “become a closed source, the maximum-profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft,” he tweeted. “Not what I intended at all.”
Musk and other AI researchers posted an open letter in late March calling for a pause on all training of AI model more potent than GPT-4.
“This pause should be public and verifiable and include all key actors,” the letter said. “If such a pause cannot be enacted quickly, governments should step in and institute a moratorium.”
Several members of the AI development industry slammed the letter, claiming it misrepresents the problems, OpenAI’s competitors pushed it, and several unique signatures were fake.
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The Pentagon’s top cyberwarfare officer dismissed Musk’s call to suspend training. “Artificial intelligence machine-learning is resonant today and is something that our adversaries are going to continue to look to exploit,” Gen. Paul Nakasone said in congressional testimony.
Microsoft, Google, and Amazon compete to control the AI marketplace. Microsoft invested in OpenAI and incorporated ChatGPT into several of its products, while Google launched the Bard chatbot in March.