Tesla CEO said Elon Musk said in an interview with FOX News host Tucker Carlson that Google co-founder wants to monopolize the market on AI technology to make himself a “digital god.”
CARLSON: Do you think that’s real? It is conceivable that AI could take control and reach a point where you couldn’t turn it off and it would be making decisions for people?
MUSK: Yeah. Absolutely.
CARLSON: Absolutely?
MUSK: No, that’s definitely the way things are headed, for sure.
I mean, things likes say, Chat GPT which is based on GP4 from Open AI which is a company I played a critical role in creating, unfortunately —
CARLSON: Back when it was a non-profit.
MUSK: Yes. Um, I mean, the reason Open AI exists at all is that [Google co-founder] 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. At least my perception was that Larry was not taking AI safety seriously enough. And —
CARLSON: What did he say about it?
MUSK: He really seemed to be — wanted sort of digital superintelligence, basically a digital god, if you will, as soon as possible.
CARLSON: Hey wanted that?
MUSK: Yes. He’s made many public statements ever the years, the whole goal of Google is what’s called AGI, artificial general intelligence, or artificial superintelligence. I agree there’s great potential for good, but there’s also potential for bad. If you’ve got some radical new technology you want to try to take a set of actions, maximize the probability it will do good, minimize probably it will do bad things.
CARLSON: Yes.
MUSK: It can’t just be barreling forwarding and you know, hope for the best. And then at one point, I said what about, you know, we gonna make sure humanity’s okay here. [Laughter]
And, um, and then he called me a specist.
CARLSON: Did he use that term?
MUSK: Yes. And there were witnesses. I wasn’t the only one there when he called me a specist. And so, I was like okay, that’s it. Yes, I’m a specist, okay. You got me. What are you? Yeah, I’m fully a specist. Busted.
So that was his last straw. At the time Google had acquired DeepMind so Google and DeepMind together had about three-quarters of all the AI talent in the world. They obviously had a lot of money and more computers than anyone else. We’re in a uni-polar world here where there’s one company that has close to a monopoly on AI talent and computers, like scaled computing, and the person who’s in charge doesn’t seem to care about safety. This is not good. So, then I thought what’s the furthest thing from Google would be like a non-profit that is fully open. Because Google was closed and for-profit. So that’s why the ‘open’ in Open AI refers to open source. You know, transparency so people know what’s going on.
CARLSON: Yes.
MUSK: We don’t want to have — I’m normally in favor of for-profit. We don’t want this to be sort of a profit-maximizing demon from hell that just never stops.