Fighting ‘Woke AI,’ Musk Recruits Team to Develop OpenAI Rival

Elon Musk has approached artificial intelligence researchers in recent weeks about forming a new research lab to develop an alternative to ChatGPT, the high-profile chatbot made by the startup OpenAI, according to two people with direct knowledge of the effort and a third person briefed on the conversations.

In recent months Musk has repeatedly criticized OpenAI for installing safeguards that prevent ChatGPT from producing text that might offend users. Musk, who co-founded OpenAI in 2015 but has since cut ties with the startup, suggested last year that OpenAI’s technology was an example of “training AI to be woke.” His comments imply that a rival chatbot would have fewer restrictions on divisive subjects compared to ChatGPT and a related chatbot Microsoft recently launched.

To spearhead the effort, Musk has been recruiting Igor Babuschkin, a researcher who recently left Alphabet’s DeepMind AI unit and specializes in the kind of machine-learning models that power chatbots like ChatGPT. In an interview, Babuschkin said building a chatbot with fewer content safeguards is not Musk’s objective.