Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk expressed his concerns about potential bias in current artificial intelligence (AI) protocols. Musk stated at Viva Tech Paris 2024 that his biggest concern is that they do not seek the truth to the maximum extent and noted that this field is pursuing political correctness.
Notable Statements from the Famous Figure
Elon Musk cited one of the most worrying examples of political correctness as the response given by Google’s Gemini AI to a striking question about preventing a global nuclear apocalypse, and he made the following remarks on the subject:
“AI might conclude that the best way to prevent misgendering is to eliminate all humans, making misgendering impossible. So you can see some dystopian outcomes there.”
Following the reaction caused by the response, Gemini AI released multiple upgrades to address these issues. However, the tech entrepreneur’s only concern is not political correctness bias, and Elon Musk shared the following statements on this topic:
“AI systems are fundamentally being trained to lie, and I think training superintelligence to be deceptive is very dangerous. Therefore, with xAI, our goal is to pursue the truth as much as possible, even if it is not popular.”
When asked to clarify what he thought lay among AI systems, Musk referred to the infamous incident in February when Google withdrew its AI image generator after it historically produced faulty and woke images, causing widespread concerns about the application’s decision-making process.
Elon Musk’s AI Initiative
Due to concerns about the current state of AI development, Musk founded his own AI company, xAI, in July 2023. Musk claims that although xAI is a relatively new company compared to OpenAI, it could become a close competitor by the end of 2024:
“xAI is a new company, so it still has a lot to do before it can compete with Google Deepmind and OpenAI. Maybe we can achieve this by the end of the year.”
In early May, xAI’s Grok chatbot was launched in Europe but is currently only available to premium and premium+ subscribers of the X platform. Discussing Grok’s future development, Musk emphasized the importance of its truth-seeking capabilities.
