April 18, 2023 - 7:15am

Elon Musk has criticised Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg for spending $400 million on “get out the vote” campaigns, which he argued was a front for funding the Democrats. “Does that sound unbiased?” Musk asked. In an interview with Tucker Carlson that aired on Monday night, he emphasised the importance of free speech on platforms like his and Facebook’s, arguing that they had a duty in a functioning democracy. “Some things are priceless,” he said. “Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy…[and] the speech needs to be as transparent and truthful as possible.”

Musk also shared his concerns about the state of Twitter before his acquisition, feeling that the platform was “drifting in a bad direction” and that the previous management did not care about improving its features or performance, only censoring it. He told Carlson that Twitter’s staff is now 20% of what it was before he took over, arguing that it was overstaffed for what he calls “a group text service at scale”.

In the course of their discussion, Musk expressed his fears about AI development. He spoke with regret about his efforts in recruiting the OpenAI team, highlighting his concerns about the organisation becoming closed-source, for-profit, and closely allied with Microsoft. With Google DeepMind now another dominant player, Musk stated his intention to create a third option in the AI landscape. 

Despite starting late, Musk hopes that a new project led by him, which he tentatively called TruthGPT, could do more good than harm by focusing on understanding the universe, rather than just being “politically correct”. Drawing a parallel between humans and chimpanzees — a species that humans could conceivably wipe out, but choose not to — the Twitter CEO argued that an AI trained to value understanding the universe is less likely to pose a threat to humanity. The big questions in terms of AI development, he told Carlson, come down to: “will humanity control its destiny or not? Will humanity control its future or not?” 


Oliver Bateman is a historian and journalist based in Pittsburgh. He blogs, vlogs, and podcasts at his Substack, Oliver Bateman Does the Work

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