Not only benchmarking OpenAI, Musk is accelerating the establishment of the "X Empire"

In February this year, Musk publicly criticized OpenAI for "going against its original intention" and emphasized that "what we need is TruthGPT."

Two months later, "TruthGPT" mentioned by Musk is finally about to be born.

"I'm going to launch a platform that I call 'TruthGPT,' or maximum truth-seeking AI, to try to understand the nature of the universe," Musk said on Monday evening.

“I think this is probably the best path to safety, in the sense that an AI that wants to understand the universe is unlikely to wipe out humanity because we are an interesting part of the universe,” he said.

Musk did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

OpenAI "goes against its original intention", "TruthGPT" aims to understand the nature of the universe and seek the truth

As we all know, Musk has always held the view of "AI threat theory". In December 2015, Musk and Altman co-founded the non-profit organization OpenAI with the original intention of responding to the "AI threat".

The common goal of the organization is: not to be controlled by any organization or person, and all research results belong to all mankind. "The best way to prevent the abuse of AI is to let as many people as possible own AI"; "If everyone owns AI, then there will be no one or a group of people who have AI privileges."

In just half a year, OpenAI received $1 billion in "investment". Due to its "non-profit" nature, the so-called "investment" is more like a "donation". At that time, Musk had "donated" $100 million, and he himself promised to provide $1 billion in financial support.

The turning point came in 2018, when Musk parted ways with OpenAI. The official explanation was that there was a conflict of interest between Tesla's artificial intelligence system and OpenAI's business, and Musk had to leave OpenAI for Tesla, but he would still support the development of OpenAI.

In 2019, Musk tweeted that he left OpenAI because he had to focus on Tesla and SpaceX. In the supplementary statement, it seemed to reveal the real reason why he was "out": "Tesla and OpenAI compete for the same talent, and I don't agree with some of the things the OpenAI team wants to do."

According to relevant reports, the most important reason for Musk's "breakup" with OpenAI was that he had different development concepts from Altman. Musk believed that OpenAI was lagging far behind Google and wanted to take full control of OpenAI's operations and management, but Musk's proposal was rejected by the board of directors. After an internal struggle, Musk left OpenAI.

After the initial "donation" of $100 million, Musk's promised $1 billion in funding was cut off. After that, OpenAI had to create a for-profit company and get $1 billion from Microsoft to "keep it alive."

Everyone knows what happened next. ChatGPT became popular, and Microsoft plans to continue to provide tens of billions of dollars in support. This is also the reason why Musk criticized OpenAI for "going against its original intention."

On February 17 this year, Musk tweeted: "OpenAI was originally intended to be an open source (that's why I named it OpenAI) non-profit company, with the goal of competing with Google, but now it has become a closed, profit-maximizing company, actually controlled by Microsoft. This is not my original intention at all!"

But if you think about it carefully, isn’t the “culprit” Musk himself?

Following the previous tweet, Musk continued: "What we need is TruthGPT."

Musk, who always keeps his word, finally announced the upcoming birth of "TruthGPT" two months later.

The two-faced Musk: publicly boycotting OpenAI and establishing X.AI behind the scenes

After publicly criticizing OpenAI for "going against its original intention" in February, Musk's "criticism" has not stopped.

On March 14, local time, OpenAI released GPT-4, which not only greatly improved the accuracy of its answers, but also had a higher level of image recognition ability, and was able to generate lyrics and creative texts to achieve style changes. In addition, the text input limit of GPT-4 was also increased to 25,000 words, and there were more optimizations for language support other than English.

Just one day later, Musk tweeted that how did a "nonprofit founded with a $100 million donation become a $30 billion for-profit company? If this is legal, why don't others do it?"

Then on March 24, Musk tweeted again that OpenAI was established to compete with large organizations like Google, but now it has fallen into the hands of Microsoft.

Perhaps it is because personal "resentful" remarks have limited lethality, so at the end of March, the American nonprofit organization Future of Life Institute issued an open letter titled "Suspend Giant AI Experiments", and Musk responded positively.

In addition to Musk himself, thousands of AI experts and industry executives, including "AI Godfather" Geoffrey Hinton and Turing Award winner Joshua Bengio, called in the letter for a six-month pause in the development of a system "more powerful" than OpenAI's new GPT-4. They suggested that if such a pause cannot be implemented quickly, "the government should intervene and implement a pause."

Some netizens believe that the reason why Musk took the lead in calling for a pause in AI research is because he wants to buy himself some time. LinkedIn founder Hoffman directly stated that this open letter is an attempt by some parties to slow down industry leaders like OpenAI so that they can catch up. As Musk's former business partner, he believes that Musk's high-profile participation in the open letter is more of a strategic move.

Then on April 3, Musk questioned the safety of OpenAI technology, saying that the emergence of ChatGPT was a very dangerous signal, etc.

Apart from talking big, Musk has never stopped taking actual actions.

On April 14th local time, the Financial Times quoted people familiar with the matter as saying that Musk is setting up an artificial intelligence startup company with the aim of competing with OpenAI, the company that developed ChatGPT.

According to business documents from the state of Nevada, Musk formed a company called X.AI on March 9 and listed himself as the company's sole director. Its secretary is Jared Birchall, a former Morgan Stanley banker who manages Musk's wealth. The Wall Street Journal said X.AI has authorized the sale of 100 million shares for the privately held company.

Musk has been in touch with some SpaceX and Tesla investors to discuss investing in the new company, a person familiar with the matter said. "A bunch of people are investing in the new company... They are excited about it."

Twitter has been incorporated into the new company X. Is Musk's "X Empire" accelerating?

Not only X.AI, Musk is also promoting a new artificial intelligence project within Twitter.

Previously, sources revealed that Musk launched an artificial intelligence project within Twitter. He not only purchased about 10,000 GPUs (graphics processing units) for this purpose, but also planned to form a team composed of artificial intelligence researchers and engineers. As of March, he had "poached" two engineers from DeepMind, the AI ​​division of Google.

Among them, Igor Babuschkin is a senior researcher in DeepMind AI department. He has also worked in OpenAI before and is a member of ChatGPT project team. He will be responsible for the development of ChatGPT-like products of Twitter. Another one is Manuel Kroiss, a 6-year veteran of DeepMind and currently serves as the new senior director of software engineering of Twitter.

It is not clear how Musk will use AI technology on Twitter. Some speculate that it may be used to improve Twitter's search function or help expand its advertising business.

As for the relationship between Twitter's new AI project and X.AI, the outside world has no way of knowing. However, from the fact that Twitter is suspected to be incorporated into "Company X", it can be inferred that Musk's "X Empire" is accelerating its construction.

Initially, Musk co-founded an online bank called X.com in 1999, which was merged into Confinity a year later and later renamed PayPal.

As early as 2020, Musk hinted that X might become the parent company of several companies he leads, including Tesla and SpaceX.

In April 2022, Musk officially established several companies with names similar to X Holdings to acquire Twitter. After the successful acquisition of Twitter in October last year, he tweeted that "buying Twitter is the catalyst for building the universal app X."

Recently, some media reported that Musk said he would re-implement the X.com plan on Twitter.

Some media have discovered that the latest disclosed court documents show that Twitter is no longer an independent company and has been incorporated into the umbrella company X created by Musk.

In a legal document related to the case filed with a California court on the 4th of this month, Twitter's lawyer stated: "Twitter, Inc. has been merged into X Corp. and no longer exists."

On the afternoon of April 11th local time, Musk sent a tweet containing only the letter "X", which seemed to officially announce the "end" of Twitter in the de facto sense.

Relevant documents show that X is a newly established shell company, which is privately held, and its parent company is X Holdings. Musk serves as the president of X Company and Group.