Musk Warns There’s a Chance AI ‘Goes Wrong and Destroys Humanity’

Elon Musk speaks at the "Twitter 2.0: From Conversations to Partnerships" marketing conference in Miami Beach, Fla., on April 18, 2023. (Chandan Khanna/AFP via Getty Images)

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has issued yet another warning about the potential dangers of artificial intelligence (AI)—namely, that it could destroy humanity.

In a May 16 interview with CNBC anchor David Faber, the tech tycoon noted that the future of AI could go one of two ways.

“There’s a strong probability that it will make life much better and that we’ll have an age of abundance,” he said. “And there’s some chance that it goes wrong and destroys humanity.”

He added: “Hopefully, that chance is small, but it’s not zero. And so, I think we want to take whatever actions we can think of to minimize the probability that AI goes wrong.”

Musk’s comments echoed concerns he shared in an April interview with Tucker Carlson, during which he posited that AI “has the potential of civilizational destruction.”

Misgivings

The rapid advancement of AI technology has alarmed many in the tech industry—particularly since the November release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, a powerful AI chatbot that uses machine learning to simulate human cognitive function.

In his May 16 interview, Musk addressed his role in the development of that groundbreaking technology.

“I am the reason OpenAI exists,” he said, revealing that he gave roughly $50 million to the research lab when it was still a nonprofit organization.

“I came up with the name,” he added. “OpenAI refers to ‘open source.’”

Open-source software is computer software that allows users to inspect, modify, and distribute its source code.

Musk said he invested in OpenAI, hoping it would pose an open-source alternative to Google DeepMind. In 2019, however, OpenAI became a for-profit company with closed-source software in a move Musk questioned the legality of.

“Let’s say you fund an organization to save the Amazon rainforest, and instead, they became a lumber company and chopped down the forest and sold it for money,” he posited. “And you’d be there like, ‘Well, wait a second, that’s the exact opposite of what I gave the money for.’ Is that legal? That doesn’t seem legal.”

New Initiative

Despite his regrets over his involvement with OpenAI, Musk recently founded his own for-profit AI company, X.AI Corp., in March, according to a Nevada business filing (pdf).

The company’s name reinforces Musk’s previous assertions that he intends to create an “everything app” called X.

For instance, in announcing Twitter’s new CEO Linda Yaccarino in a May 12 tweet, Musk wrote: “@LindaYacc will focus primarily on business operations, while I focus on product design & new technology. Looking forward to working with Linda to transform this platform into X, the everything app.”

In keeping with that plan, Musk also recently merged Twitter, Inc., which he also owns, into the company X Corp., which has the parent company X Holdings Corp.

As a result, the social media company is now also incorporated in Nevada.

Musk has said that his X app would be modeled after WeChat, a Chinese messaging app that operates as a one-stop-shop for practically everything, including gaming, financial services, transportation, ordering food, and more.

However, apps like WeChat have sparked concerns about user privacy, given the amount of user data they provide companies—and in WeChat’s case, the Chinese government—access to.

The app has also reportedly been used as a tool for government censorship.

Despite those concerns, per Axios, Twitter made its first acquisition under Musk’s leadership on May 16 with the purchase of the job-matching platform Laskie.

When reached for comment about the potential risks that Musk’s “everything app” could pose in combination with AI technology, Twitter responded with a poop emoji.