Tesla and SpaceX owner Elon Musk, who has developed the artificial intelligence chatbot Grok, told Dr. Jordan B. Peterson in an interview on Monday that he is alarmed by the lack of “pro-human” principles among competing AI companies and hopes his AI model will be the “most powerful in the world” by December.
Musk sat down with Peterson at his Gigafactory Texas for an exclusive interview that was streamed live on DailyWire+ and X. The billionaire entrepreneur started Grok to compete with Google Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, another AI chatbot that Musk co-founded with Sam Altman before Musk left the company in 2018 over disagreements about its future. After Musk took over Twitter and changed its name to X, he connected Grok to the platform, allowing premium subscribers to have access to the AI tool.
Musk has also called out the leftist bent of AI tools such as ChatGPT and Gemini, Google’s AI tool. The SpaceX founder has vowed to push back against leftist talking points being pushed by other AI companies. Musk also told Peterson that he “grew increasingly concerned” about AI safety when he discussed the topic with former Google CEO Larry Page, discussions that Musk said led to him starting OpenAI with Altman, and eventually his own AI chatbot, Grok.
“He did call me a speciesist,” Musk said of Page, adding, “I’m a speciesist in favor of humans instead of machines. Larry’s view is, if I’m not misspeaking, that we will all upload our minds to the computer and everyone will just be robots.”
“There’s not much difference between that and the death of humanity,” Peterson said. “Because whatever we’d be then it wouldn’t be what we are now.”
“It’s a crazy thing to not be pro-human,” Musk said later in the interview. “I mean, if humans are not going to be on team human, who is? That was the final straw. I was like, we really need some new AI company so there’s a counter-balance to Google.”
.@elonmusk: [Larry Page’s] view is, if I’m not misspeaking, that ultimately we will all upload our minds to the computer and everyone will just be robots.@jordanbpeterson: There’s not much difference between that and the death of humanity. pic.twitter.com/a6D3HcLXiW
— Daily Wire (@realDailyWire) July 22, 2024
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Musk also laid out a specific and aggressive timeline for his AI company’s next models.
“We have a lot of catching up to do relative to companies that have been around for five or 10 or 20 years,” Musk told Peterson. “We’re catching up fast. The velocity of improvement of xAI is faster than any other company out there.”
“How do you feel that Grok performs, say, in relationship to ChatGPT now?” Peterson asked.
“Well, so the Grok version that’s been released is still based on Grok version one training,” Musk replied. “We’ve made several improvements, so it’s sort of called Grok 1.5. But the foundation model of Grok is still an order of magnitude weaker than ChatGPT.”
Peterson asked the X chairman how powerful the next model of his AI chatbot will be in comparison to the competition. Musk said the second version of Grok recently “finished training” and the engineers are now “fixing bugs” before officially releasing Grok 2 next month.
“It should be on par, or close to” ChatGPT’s latest model, Musk said.
“Then what we’re doing in the Memphis Data Center is we’re actually training Grok 3. So that, that’ll probably finish training in about three or four months and then there’ll be some fine-tuning and bug fixing and whatnot. And we’re hoping to release Grok 3 by December,” he added. “And Grok 3 should be the most powerful AI in the world at that point.”