Elon Musk Says Making AI Safe Requires New Model and Regulations

Elon Musk seeks both a new generative artificial intelligence (AI) model and government regulations.

Of the “two heavyweights in this arena,” ChatGPT creator OpenAI is closely aligned with Microsoft and DeepMind is owned by Google, Musk told Tucker Carlson in an interview on Fox News.

“I think I will create a third option,” Musk said during the interview. “I’ll be starting very late in the game, of course.”

Musk said his TruthGPT will be a “maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe.”

“This might be the best path to safety in that an AI that cares about understanding the universe is unlikely to annihilate humans because we are an interesting part of the universe — hopefully, they would think that,” Musk said.

Musk also said during the interview that it is difficult to predict what will happen when AI becomes smarter than humans.

Because AI can be a danger to the public, it should be overseen by the government, just as food and aviation are overseen by government agencies, Musk said.

“I have actually for a long time been a strong advocate of AI regulation,” Musk said.

Noting that he has a lot of experience with regulated industries because of his involvement with automobiles and rockets, Musk said it’s a challenge to be regulated but that his companies comply with regulations and generally agree with them.

He said a regulatory agency should initially seek insight into AI, solicit opinion from the industry and then enter a proposed rulemaking process.

Those rules would then “probably, hopefully, be grudgingly accepted by the major players in AI,” Musk said.

“I think we’ll have a better chance of advanced AI being beneficial to humanity in that circumstance,” he added.

As PYMNTS reported Monday (April 17), the rapid development of AI capabilities, paired with its attractive industry-agnostic integration use cases, is already proving to be a challenge for regulators and lawmakers around the world as they race to address them.

This race is happening at a time when Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai has called AI and its implications across business and society “more profound than fire or electricity.”