Twitter CEO Elon Musk gave an extended sit-down interview with Fox News host Tucker Carlson on Monday night to discuss the dangers and challenges of artificial intelligence (AI), as well as his October acquisition of Twitter.
Key Details
- Elon Musk discusses the dangers of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and the threat that AI presents to humanity. He says he is a “big fan” of the technology but that it poses a greater threat to humanity than any other technology.
- After accusing ChatGPT of being politically biased and “politically correct,” Musk suggests that he is designing his own chatbot called TruthGPT, a “maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe.”
- Musk also accuses the government of accessing private Twitter DMs and says he is working on private end-to-end encryption to prevent further access.
- Musk also shares how years ago he broke with Google co-founder Larry Page over artificial intelligence, when he says Page did not take the threat of AI seriously enough.
Why It’s News
Monday’s interview was notable for numerous reasons, among them the fact that it was a rare extended sitdown interview with the entrepreneur who runs Space X, Tesla, Neuralink, Boring Company, and Twitter.
“The reason Open AI exists at all is that Larry Page and I used to be close friends and I would stay at his house in Palo Alto and I would talk to him late in the night about AI safety,” Musk tells Carlson. “At least my perception was that Larry was not taking AI safety seriously enough.”
As we previously reported, Musk took an adversarial stance against the media last week in his interview with the BBC, going as far as to call journalist James Clayton a liar for making unsubstantiated claims.
The interview is also notable for the fact that Musk chose to give it to Fox News. Despite voting for President Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election, Musk has shown more positive attention to Republican politicians and states in the past few years. He joins them in regularly calling out progressive politicians and political correctness, sharing many of their talking points about free speech and “wokeness.”
Notable Quote
“The problem with AI is that it might control your brain through words. And this is the application that we need to worry about now, particularly going into the next presidential election. The Democratic Party, as usual, was ahead of the curve on this. They’ve been thinking about how to harness AI for political power,” says Musk.
Backing Up A Bit
Elon Musk remains a prominent critic and proponent of AI research and development. He was a founding member of OpenAI in 2015 before leaving the company after disagreeing with the direction of the company. He laments that the non-profit is now partnered with Microsoft. He told podcast host Joe Rogan in 2017 that AI researchers presented a potential for incredible innovation and danger and that the technology may rapidly grow out of control.
Musk continues to develop Twitter into a new platform, having watched his $44-billion investment lose half its valuation due to declining advertising revenue. He continues to reveal ambitious details of his plan to reinvigorate Twitter, having previously promised to convert the social media platform into a revolutionary new financial platform.
Alternative Perspective
Washington Post columnist Phillip Bump notes that the conversation was framed heavily through Carlson’s perspective—that Twitter is fighting a war from incestuous government overreach and encroachment that threatened the future of the country.
“Carlson took Musk’s modest—and themselves not apolitical—criticisms and turned them into part of the left’s grand plan to subsume the nation, as he does with everything … Something is being sold to the audience. In Musk’s case, it’s a safe, bold, right-wing-empathetic Twitter. In Carlson’s, it’s the revelation of a dystopic America that must be tracked through vigilant observation each weekday at 8 p.m.”