Twitter chief Elon Musk has now launched an artificial intelligence (AI) company to challenge the Sam Altman-led OpenAI, whose ChatGPT has been the tech sector’s ‘talk of the town’ in 2023.
The billionaire tech mogul, who helped to co-found OpenAI in 2015, but left the San Francisco-based start-up in 2018 over the alleged ‘conflict of interest’, recently accused the company of being ‘woke’.
xAI, launched by Elon Musk, has now said that its goal would be to ‘understand the true nature of the universe’.
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. Hendrycks hit the headline earlier this year as he organised an open letter warning that AI could pose existential risks to humanity, a similar concern echoed by Elon Musk.
Since the ChatGPT launch, Elon Musk has accused the generative chatbot of being biased in favour of left-wing and ‘politically correct views’. It is to be noted here that Elon Musk, a self-proclaimed ‘Free Speech Absolutist’, has loosened popular microblogging site Twitter’s moderation rules, apart from reinstating previously banned right-wing accounts.
In April, Elon Musk talked about launching a rival chatbot called ‘TruthGPT’ and now; you have the inception of xAI.
Meanwhile, another San Francisco-based tech company Anthropic has now made its chatbot, Claude 2, publicly available in the US and the UK, with the ability to summarise novel-sized blocks of text and operate from safety principles drawn from sources like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
The chatbot has reportedly been trained on principles taken from documents including the 1948 UN declaration and Apple’s service terms, covering issues like data privacy and online impersonation.
As per Anthropic, Claude 2 can summarise blocks of text of up to 75,000 words.
“However, the chatbot appears to be prone to ‘hallucinations’ or factual errors, such as mistakenly claiming that AS Roma won the 2023 Europa Conference League, instead of West Ham United. Asked about the result of the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, Claude 2 said every local council area voted ‘no’, when in fact Dundee, Glasgow, North Lanarkshire and West Dunbartonshire voted for independence,” Guardian stated, as it reviewed the chatbot’s performance.