In the weeks leading up to Elon Musk’s troubled takeover of Twitter, the Tesla and SpaceX boss seemed tormented by one word: freedom.
Through his beloved polls, Musk had worried about whether users of the Twitter social network wanted more or less freedom on the platform (and it is unknown who could have dared to answer that they would have wanted less).
And he continued for days and days, repeatedly declaring himself a standard bearer of freedom of speech.
We were easy prophets, even if reality surpassed the most fervent of fantasies: once at the helm of Twitter, Elon Musk fired, alienated investors and advertisers, eroded part of the hard core of social users and so on.
There’s no need to be too calm now that, for the fetish word freedom, Musk has replaced an even more ambitious (and, on closer inspection, vague) one: truth.
Let’s circumstantiate the speech.
Elon Musk annuncia TruthGPT
Revealing his AI projects, Elon Musk announced TruthGPT. Even if the name had already been spoiled (as they say today) by Musk himself in a tweet dated February 17th.
It was during an interview with Fox News that the owner of Twitter revealed his cards. And already the first words spoken by Elon Musk to Tucker Carlson of Fox News were… in full Elon Musk style.
Statements of intent
Ready go, here’s how Elon Musk began: “I’m going to launch something I’ll call TruthGPT, or a truth-seeking AI that seeks to understand the nature of the universe.
And I think this could be the best path to salvation in the sense that an artificial intelligence that cares about understanding the universe is unlikely to annihilate humans, because we ourselves are an important part of the universe.
The salvific role that Elon Musk attributes to TruthGPT (and therefore to himself) is not accidental, but fits perfectly with an ongoing controversy. Let’s see which one.
Elon Musk, TruthGPT e OpenAI
Musk was in fact the first signatory to an open letter, in which a certain concern is revealed regarding the possible outcomes of artificial intelligence.
In the letter we are informed that “AI systems with human-like competitive intelligence can pose serious risks to society and humanity, as demonstrated by extensive research and recognized by top AI laboratories.”
Recall that Musk is the same one who would like to take man to Mars (via Starlink) and implant microchips in human brains (via Neuralink).
A technological competition
In the interview, Elon Musk does not provide other details on TruthGPT, but he certainly clarifies the meaning of his new operation.
Which appears to have two distinct origins. The first is one competition played on an exquisitely technological level. In recent weeks, Musk has in fact declared that he has founded X.Ai, a Nevada-based company that aims to enter the crackling artificial intelligence market with ambitious goals.
The political aspects
Ma even more important seems to us the political aspect of the question, which corresponds to the second reason why Elon Musk announced TruthGPT.
The open letter against OpenAI was just a tepid appetizer. In an interview with Fox News, Musk said ChatGPT’s software is programmed by leftist experts who train chatbots to lie.
This, Musk continued, could have repercussions for the upcoming US presidential election. But it would even have in itself “the potential for the destruction of civilization”.
Apart from the fact that the story of someone who takes the field to save the world threatened by the left (he is the bearer of love against those who sow hatred and destruction) shouldn’t resonate new to us Italians, apart from that, in short, here we go again. Musk returns to play the savior, the redeemer.
Given what he did in the first months of running Twitter, when he should have been the champion of freedom, there is no need to sleep too peacefully, now that he has assigned himself none other than the task of standard bearer of truth.
Truth e TruthGPT
In the end, many readers will not have missed the near homonymy between Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence, TruthGPT, and Donald Trump’s app, Truth.
The coincidence testifies, or rather confirms, Musk’s political sympathies. But given the non-irresistible success of the former US president’s platform, it doesn’t seem like the best of omens.