Billionaire Elon Musk reached out to artificial intelligence researchers in recent weeks to discuss the forming of a new research lab to develop an alternative to chatbot ChatGPT, The Information said in a report on February 27.

Tesla and Twitter boss Musk has been in talks to hire Igor Babuschkin, a researcher who recently left Alphabet's DeepMind AI unit, to lead the development of the competition to high-profile chatbot made by startup OpenAI, the report said.

Babuschkin specializes in the kind of machine-learning models that power chatbots like ChatGPT, which has so far cleared MBA exams, written prose and poetry and is already replacing workers in the US at an alarming speed. In an interview cited by The Information, Babuschkin said building a chatbot with fewer content safeguards is not Musk’s objective.

The development comes at a time when Musk has been critical of ChatGPT, calling it “scary good.” “We are not far from dangerously strong AI,” he had said in a tweet in December.

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Earlier on February 26, Musk took to Twitter to say he was having a bit of an AI existential angst. “But, all things considered with regard to AGI existential angst, I would prefer to be alive now to witness AGI than be alive in the past and not,” he wrote on the microblogging site.

He has in the past criticized OpenAI for installing safeguards that prevent ChatGPT from producing text that might offend users.

Earlier this month, the billionaire said, “One of the biggest risks to the future of civilization is AI.” At the World Government Summit in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, also said that it’s both positive or negative and has great, great promise, great capability but “with that comes great danger.”

Musk is of the view that AI safety needs to be regulated as it is a bigger risk to society than cars or planes or medicine. Regulation “may slow down AI a little bit, but I think that that might also be a good thing,” he has said.

Also Read | Generative AI like ChatGPT will be a co-worker, will not replace jobs: TCS

It is interesting to note that Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015 but has since cut ties with the startup. In fact, last year he said, OpenAI’s technology was an example of “training AI to be woke.”

According to The Information report, Musk and Babuschkin are in talks to bring together a team to pursue AI research but the project is still in the early stages, with no concrete plan to develop specific products.

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