Elon Musk has laid out his plans for an artificial-intelligence company, seeking to rival Microsoft and Google-parent Alphabet (ticker:GOOG). Shareholders of Tesla might not like his direction of thinking.
“I’m going to start something which I call ‘Truth GPT’ or a maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe,” Mr. Musk said in an interview on Fox News Channel’s Tucker Carlson Tonight late on Monday.
Musk said he was concerned that ChatGPT –the chatbot launched by OpenAI and backed by Microsoft (MSFT)– has been trained to be “politically correct”. That suggests the Tesla (TSLA) CEO intends to dive further into the controversial political waters which have marked his tenure as owner of social-media company Twitter. He will need to be careful not to potentially alienate a large part of what would normally be the base of customers for Tesla’s electric vehicles.
Tesla shares were up 0.4% in premarket trading on Tuesday.
Musk was recently reported to be starting his own AI-focused company by the Financial Times. The billionaire was named as a director in a business-incorporation document filed in March for a new company called X.ai Corp.
The move comes despite Musk recently signing an open letter calling for a pause in training more powerful systems, alongside various AI researchers. Musk co-founded OpenAI but left the company in 2018.
The first part of Musk’s interview aired Monday, with a second part scheduled to air on Fox News on Tuesday night. Fox Corp. shares common ownership with News Corp (NWSA), the parent of Dow Jones, which publishes Barron’s .