Elon Musk Tries to Direct AI—Again
His latest startup follows a decade of being outmanoeuvred in his quest to steer the development of artificial intelligence
6 min
For at least a decade, Elon Musk has tried to steer the development of artificial intelligence—only to be outmanoeuvred by rivals and former allies.
He has now stepped up his efforts after the success of OpenAI, an organisation he co-founded but then left after a power struggle. Mr. Musk has warned for years that poorly built artificial intelligence could have catastrophic effects on humanity. Since OpenAI’s ChatGPT became a viral sensation last November, Mr. Musk has denounced it as politically correct and warned it could lead AI to become too powerful for humans to control.
He has called his new effort TruthGPT, and billed it as a truth-seeking artificial intelligence model that will one day comprehend the universe. On March 9, he incorporated a company called X.AI in Nevada, laying the formal groundwork.
So far, he has struggled to define a precise vision for his startup and is still in the process of assembling a team, said people familiar with the matter. Musk’s representatives have said X.AI intends to raise cash at some point from investors, the people said.
Mr. Musk didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Two weeks after incorporating X.AI, Mr. Musk signed an open letter calling for a six-month pause on the development of AI models stronger than the latest one released by OpenAI, called GPT-4. The letter was organised by the Future of Life Institute, which says its goal is to steer transformative technology away from extreme, large-scale risks. Its biggest funder is Mr. Musk.
Steven Weber, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley who met Mr. Musk several years ago at a gathering of A.I. academics in Northern California, sees a consistent thread through what appear to be opposing impulses.
“He holds both of these beliefs at once: that human beings can’t be relied on to really control technology, and technology is going to advance and it needs to advance subject to his vision, more than anybody else,” Mr. Weber said.
“AI stresses me out,” Mr. Musk said at the end of a March presentation given to Tesla Inc. investors. “It’s quite dangerous technology. I fear I may have done some things to accelerate it.”
For X.AI, he hired Igor Babuschkin, a senior scientist at DeepMind, an AI lab under Alphabet Inc.’s Google, to lead the effort, people familiar with the matter said. Mr. Musk also purchased powerful computer chips similar to ones used in the technology behind ChatGPT, one of the people said.
He is still trying to attract top talent from leading labs and universities, people familiar with the matter said. Some AI researchers said they have been turned off by Mr. Musk’s struggles to turn Twitter around since acquiring the social-media company in October, as well as his public attacks on OpenAI.
Mr. Musk’s faltering attempts to steer AI’s development date back more than a decade. He has previously said he made an early investment in DeepMind, founded in 2010, to monitor its AI research rather than make money.
In late 2013, he launched a last-minute bid to purchase DeepMind, the leading AI lab at the time, but lost out to Google, according to people familiar with the talks. Mr. Musk wanted to steer the lab’s research and told associates that Google’s then-Chief Executive Larry Page couldn’t be trusted to oversee the creation of advanced AI, according to people familiar with his thinking.
DeepMind has become a central element of Google’s efforts to infuse advanced AI into its search powerhouse, and recently merged with another AI unit called Brain to form Google DeepMind. In a recent interview with Tucker Carlson on Fox News, Mr. Musk said he and Mr. Page used to be close friends who spent nights discussing AI safety at Mr. Page’s home in Palo Alto, Calif.
Mr. Page wanted to create a “digital god” as soon as possible, Mr. Musk said, and in their conversations called Mr. Musk a “speciesist” for saying it was important that the technology protected humanity.
Mr. Page and representatives at Google didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Mr. Musk’s interest in buying DeepMind was informal and didn’t reach the DeepMind board, according to the people familiar with the talks. It hasn’t previously been reported.
Mr. Musk co-founded OpenAI two years later with Sam Altman, the current chief executive, and several others. The organisation was founded as a nonprofit and intended to serve as a counterweight to Google, with the goal of developing AI in a safer, more transparent way than large tech companies could.
Mr. Musk served as the financial linchpin for the project and promised to make sure that OpenAI fully received the $1 billion in funding promised by early backers, people involved with the effort said. He recruited employees and met regularly with company leaders to set the vision, they said.
Mr. Musk set an aggressive research timeline for OpenAI, warning that the company’s credibility would be compromised if it didn’t achieve a major breakthrough soon after its launch, according to former employees familiar with the remarks. He often conducted polls among employees to see when they thought so-called artificial general intelligence—in which machines are able to match or surpass the intelligence of humans—could be achieved, former employees said.
In September 2017, Mr. Musk told his brother, Kimball Musk, and a longtime financial backer that he saw OpenAI and Neuralink, a startup he founded to link humans with computers through brain implants, as worthy of more of his time, according to recently released court documents related to a lawsuit against Tesla over Mr. Musk’s compensation.
“OpenAI and Neuralink are both critical to a good future for humanity. My instincts tell me that I should be devoting a much higher percentage of time to them,” Mr. Musk texted them, according to the documents. OpenAI and Neuralink at one point shared an office in San Francisco.
Mr. Musk grew frustrated with what he saw as OpenAI’s slow progress and pushed for more control of the company, The Wall Street Journal previously reported. At the time, OpenAI didn’t have a chief executive or a formal management structure.
Mr. Musk clashed with Mr. Altman, who wanted to create a for-profit arm that would allow OpenAI to raise cash from investors, people familiar with the matter said.
Mr. Musk subsequently left. Mr. Altman, who has said he considers Mr. Musk a mentor, became CEO in 2019, created a for-profit entity and raised $1 billion from Microsoft Corp.
Mr. Musk tweeted in March that he had donated around $100 million to OpenAI, though people familiar with the figure said he contributed less than $50 million.
Mr. Musk focused his AI efforts at Tesla, where he made progress in using the technology to enhance its driver-assistance systems. He said the EV maker would start introducing a fleet of robotaxis by 2020, and showcased a humanoid robot he said would feature safeguards to prevent wrongdoing by the machine.
Regulators are scrutinising Tesla’s driver-assistance software for safety problems. The company has yet to roll out robotaxis, which rely on the kind of driverless technology that Google sister company Waymo and General Motors Co.’s Cruise LCC have begun to deploy.
Mr. Musk grew more publicly critical of OpenAI after the company released ChatGPT last fall, accusing the company of being a “maximum-profit company” controlled by Microsoft. “Not what I intended at all,” he tweeted.
In a March 28 interview with the Journal, Mr. Altman said OpenAI took its safety obligations seriously.
“We spent more than six months after we finished GPT-4 to safety test, to align it, to really probe its capabilities, at a time when I believe some of the [Future of Life Institute] letter signatories were even, you know, pushing us to release it faster,” Mr. Altman said. He declined to specify which signatories he meant but said seeing those names prompted “some eye rolls.”
In early 2023, Mr. Musk texted Mr. Altman that he was starting a rival AI effort, according to people familiar with the exchange. Mr. Altman wished him well but said he didn’t understand how a new lab would allay Mr. Musk’s concerns about AI development, they said.
One OpenAI board member, Shivon Zilis, stepped down in part due to a conflict of interest with Mr. Musk’s new AI efforts, said people familiar with the matter. Ms. Zilis is also an executive at Mr. Musk’s Neuralink and had twins with Mr. Musk in 2021. Ms. Zilis didn’t respond to a request for comment.
After ChatGPT’s release, Mr. Musk said on Twitter that he cut off OpenAI from access to a pipeline of Twitter data, which OpenAI could potentially use for training the AI models powering ChatGPT. “I just learned that OpenAI had access to Twitter database for training,” Mr. Musk tweeted in early December. “I put that on pause for now.” People familiar with OpenAI say the company didn’t use this Twitter data to train its models.
A few days later, Mr. Musk visited OpenAI’s San Francisco headquarters at Mr. Altman’s invitation and the two had what turned into a lengthy discussion about the Twitter decision, among other topics, according to current and former OpenAI employees.
At one point, an OpenAI researcher showed Mr. Musk how Twitter could potentially use ChatGPT. Mr. Musk brought one of his toddlers and a nanny, some of the people said, and he and the nanny took turns bouncing the child on their laps when the child grew fussy.
He struck a benign tone with employees, who found him wandering around the kitchen and hallways with his security detail, the employees said.
In one conversation, Mr. Musk entertained the idea that the universe was a computer simulation, they said. Soon after, he left the building.
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As AI productivity trackers reshape workplace evaluations, employees are learning how to manage calendars, activity levels and AI usage to ensure their contributions are recognized.
4 min
What’s more important than being a good employee right now? Looking like a good employee in the eyes of AI productivity trackers that more managers are using to evaluate their teams.
Employee-monitoring systems are especially popular at tech companies and are also used by other white-collar firms that want to probe how people spend company time. The scary thing: You might not even know you’re being watched because many states don’t require disclosure.
Metrics can include performance data that is undoubtedly relevant, such as sales results. But it also can employ dubious proxies like keyboard strokes and how often your computer screen goes into sleep mode.
We generally accepted, or at least understood, heightened surveillance during the work-from-home era. Back then it seemed reasonable for bosses to keep tabs on employees they couldn’t see.
Yet the oversight has only escalated, and tensions are rising, too.
A group of former Meta Platforms employees alleges in a lawsuit that the company used a “constellation of internal artificial-intelligence systems” when it began laying off about 10% of its workforce in May. Meta says humans make termination calls.
However that case shakes out, a couple of things are clear. Companies eager to gauge which employees are locked in now have sophisticated AI monitoring systems at their disposal. And they believe they have leverage in a tepid labor market.
So while we may chafe at having our worth reduced to numbers on the boss’s productivity dashboard, we have to play the game as it’s being played. Here are some tips, based on conversations with people who make employee monitoring systems—and others who game the systems.
Be meticulous about your calendar
Calendar integration is one way that productivity trackers have gotten more advanced and, ostensibly, fairer.
Let’s say you make an old-fashioned phone call or attend an in-person meeting. Your Outlook or Slack status may switch to “away,” making you appear as inactive as if you were taking an extended coffee break.
Employee monitors like one made by a company called Insightful cross-check your online status with your calendar to see whether there is a valid reason for your apparent inactivity. If that call or meeting is on your schedule, then the system will recognize that you are busy offline. If nothing is on the books, it could look like you’re slacking off.
Hit the activity sweet spot, around 80%
Let’s not go any further without addressing the underlying question: How much downtime is permissible during the workday? After all, people have been scared to let managers see anything non-work-related on their screens since personal computers first arrived in offices.
No one knows this better than Roger Wagner, who is widely credited with creating the first “boss button” in the early 1980s. He designed a keyboard shortcut to instantly display a spreadsheet if the boss walked by your cubicle while you were playing a computer game. Boss buttons have been features of countless diversions since. (I confess to using one built into a March Madness streaming app.)
Wagner, the founder of computer-education company 1010 Technologies, says his original design was a joke—more of a commentary on overbearing managers than a cover for lazy employees. Good bosses understand workers need mental breaks throughout the day, he says.
This matches what I heard from Insightful Chief Executive Ivan Petrovic. He says customers that use his company’s workforce-management platform don’t expect employees to stay on task 100% of the time.
“On average companies are aiming for 60% to 80% of your time being utilized for work during the day,” he says.
Go ahead and exhale. It’s probably OK to watch an occasional YouTube video at your desk.
And if you’re going to artificially inflate your activity level, be careful. Hitting 90% could look suspicious.
Get physical
So don’t leave your mouse jiggler on all day. Choose the right one if you must resort to shenanigans.
There are lots of software applications that mimic the movements of a computer mouse, so you can appear to be working while away from your desk. There are also devices that plug into computer ports and do the same thing.
Corporate cybersecurity systems increasingly block these apps and devices, and productivity trackers claim to be able to detect them. But some workers swear by mouse docks, like one made by Tech8 USA, that keep cursors moving. The company originally made mouse-moving software but now focuses on physical jigglers.
“People are drawn to mechanical solutions because they’re so simple and don’t require software,” says Tech8 Marketing Director Sam Matthews. “As monitoring technology becomes more sophisticated, that distinction has become even more relevant.”
Use AI, but not too much
Another popular metric for employee-monitoring systems is AI usage. Companies want to know who is embracing new tools, and it can be tempting to think more is better.
“There’s a performative aspect where employees overblow their usage of AI so that they appear relevant in the organization,” says Andrea Derler, principal researcher at Visier, which helps companies track and analyze employee work habits.
In a recent Visier survey of 1,000 U.S. workers, 48% admitted to exaggerating their AI usage.
This is already an outdated strategy. Using AI for everything used to score points for experimentation. Now it can seem wasteful because many companies are watching AI token spending more carefully.
Look, productivity theater has always been part of work. Most of us aren’t trying to cheat the system, but expectations are changing so quickly that we need to be savvy about what the latest employee trackers are looking for.
Sometimes it takes a little gamesmanship to get full credit for our contributions.
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