Exploring the Potential of xAI to Help Humanity Avoid the Negative Impacts of AI Predicted by Elon Musk

Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, has long been a prominent critic of artificial intelligence (AI). He has expressed concerns about the uncontrolled advancement of AI and its potential to harm our civilization. In fact, he has gone as far as signing a petition urging leaders in both business and government to halt AI development until a comprehensive regulatory framework is established. However, on July 12, Musk surprised many by announcing his own AI company called xAI, with the goal of “understanding the universe.” This raises the question of whether he has a plan to address the challenges posed by the “AI demon” he has warned about.

10 times Elon Musk warned the world about artificial intelligence

Elon Musk has never shied away from speaking his mind, and his Twitter account is his favorite place to talk about it. So when the excitement of artificial intelligence left Silicon Valley and became a global phenomenon, with companies left and right adopting the new technology, Musk expressed concern about the same thing.

1. The first time he tweeted against the rise of artificial intelligence 1. December 2022, where he used an analogy (referring to a Beatles song) to explain the logical fallacy of artificial intelligence. He said: “There is still no good strawberry-picking robot, but researchers are working on it. When they use artificial intelligence to maximize the number of strawberries picked, it might do its best to get more and more planted, until finally the strawberry fields are forever.

2. Just the next day, Musk once again weighed in on the lack of regulation in the AI space in a tweet where a user expressed concern about Neuralink starting human testing. He said: “Compared to AI, Neuralink’s progress is slow and easy to gauge because medical devices are approved by major regulatory bodies. AI has no regulatory oversight, which is a *big* problem. I’ve been calling for AI safety regulations for over a decade!

3. For the rest of the month, he called OpenAI’s ChatGPT several times when it was revealed that the chatbot had a left-wing political ideology in its early days. In a viral tweet, he said, “There is great danger in training AI to lie.”

4. In February, the Microsoft Bing chatbot was released and in its early days it behaved erratically, including an instance where it said it wanted to be human. Musk tweeted a link to the article, saying, “Sounds like a scary AI from System Shock going crazy and killing everyone.”

5. In an interview with Tucker Carlson, Musk said, “Artificial intelligence is more dangerous than, say, poorly managed aircraft design or maintenance, or poor car production, in the sense that it has the potential—however small the probability, but it’s not trivial—it has the potential of civilization possibility of destruction.”

6. When a user called out Musk for being hypocritical and criticizing AI when he founded OpenAI (he has since left the company), he replied: “OpenAI was created as an open source (that’s why I named it “Open” AI) , a non-profit company, which acts as a counterweight to Google, but has now become a closed-source, profit-maximizing company effectively controlled by Microsoft. Not at all what I meant.”

7. SpaceX’s CEO continued to criticize OpenAI’s GPT model even after changes were made to prevent the chatbot from responding to prompts that contained discriminatory text about race, religion, disability, gender, etc. He called it bias and said, “Rewarding AI bias/deception is the path to a dystopian future.”

8. When OpenAI gave Microsoft exclusive rights to the GPT-3 model, Musk tweeted: “This seems to be the antithesis of open. OpenAI has basically been hijacked by Microsoft.”

9. While highlighting the risks of artificial intelligence, he even expressed a benign addiction to technology. He tweeted: “Even a benign addiction to AI/automation is dangerous to civilization if taken so far that we eventually forget how machines work”.

10. Musk revealed that he even briefed Obama on AI regulation. He said: “I saw it (the dangers of the rise of intelligent AI) happening long before GPT-1, which is why I tried to warn the public for years. My only meeting with Obama as president was not to promote Tesla or SpaceX, but to regulate AI.

Origin of xAI

Based on all these caveats, Musk can easily be thought of as anti-AI. However, now he has founded his own artificial intelligence company. But there is no cognitive dissonance, as many have wondered. He has mentioned several times his desire to start an AI company and his reason for starting it.

On March 30, 2023, Musk responded to a tweet about the right reason to build AI: “Optimizing AI to achieve the best understanding of the universe may be the right goal. Removing or slowing down human civilization would reduce understanding.” In a separate interview with Carl Tuckerson, he also said that he might end up calling his AI company “TruthGPT,” “a maximal truth-seeking AI trying to understand the nature of the universe.”

In April 2023, when Musk merged Twitter with X Corp, he also registered X.AI Corp as an AI startup, hinting at things to come.

While attending a Wall Street Journal event later, Musk explained his vision for xAI. He said: “I think there should be a significant third horse in the race here. I don’t want to jump on the bandwagon, but OpenAI has a relationship with Microsoft that seems to be working very well… so it’s possible that X.AI and Twitter and Tesla could have something similar”.

How will Musk save humanity?

It seems that Musk is likely to harness the technologies of the amazingly successful SpaceX and Tesla to power AI models in xAI, and the result will also be shared with Musk’s companies to make them more AI capable.

What is the purpose of xAI? We don’t know much at this point, as Musk didn’t provide any information about what the startup will actually do. However, we found its official website. The site says, “XAI’s goal is to understand the true nature of the universe,” supporting his earlier statement about the purpose of AI.

Interestingly, the company’s advisor is Dan Hendrycks, who currently serves as the director of the AI Security Center. So it’s likely that Musk’s new company will either try to stay out of areas where it could cause “civilization destruction” or find a more ethical way to solve problems in the AI space.

Musk will also host a Twitter Spaces chat on the official XAI Twitter account tomorrow, July 14, where users can meet the team and ask them questions. We should know more about Musk’s efforts to save humanity from unregulated AI.