Billionaire and tech mogul Elon Musk recently claimed that he will develop “TruthGPT”, a new type of AI chatbot to rival OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and called for the regulation of AI technology.

"I'm going to start something which you call TruthGPT or a maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe. And I think this might be the best path to safety, in the sense that an AI that cares about understanding the universe is unlikely to annihilate humans because we are an interesting part of the universe," said Musk during an interview.

It is reported that Musk has been poaching employees from Google to start a company that could rival OpenAI.

He has also created and incorporated an AI company called X.AI, headquartered in Nevada, and has become its only director, according to a state filing.

Musk is also critical of OpenAI, saying that “they (OpenAI) are training their AI to lie,” and it has become a “closed source”, a “maximum-profit company” .

It is said that Elon Musk co-founded OpenAI with others in 2015, but stepped down from the company's board of directors in 2018. In 2019, he explained on social media that he left OpenAI to better focus on Tesla and SpaceX. At the same time, he also stated that he disagreed with some of what the OpenAI team wanted to do.

Musk reiterated in an interview his concerns about the implications of the exponential growth of AI, saying “AI is more dangerous than, say, mismanaged aircraft design or production maintenance or bad car production”. He added that “it has the potential – however small one may regard that probability, but it is non-trivial – it has the potential of civilizational destruction.”

“I think there should be some government oversight because it’s a danger to the public,” said Musk in the interview, noting that people should be cautious of AI because it is hard for us to predict what will happen in the future.

Musk said that he had always advocated strong and wise regulation. He even said on social media that he used his only meeting with then-president Barack Obama not to promote the sale of Tesla or SpaceX products, but to call for regulation on AI.

He pointed out that, just as the United States protects food and drug consumption through the Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration, and protects aircraft through the Federal Aviation Administration, there should be corresponding institutions established to regulate AI.

Musk proposed that the AI regulatory agency should put forward a set of industry operational rules to “ensure AI programs can benefit humanity”.

He's among the entrepreneurs and computer scientists who recently signed a letter calling for a six-month pause in developing systems more powerful than OpenAI's newly launched GPT-4, citing the technology’s potential risks to society.