Former Twitter employees have stated that the company is developing a covert artificial intelligence (AI) technology to generate human speech. CEO Elon Musk’s belief that such technology will be ‘catastrophic’ for humanity is pretty hypocritical if this is the case.
The billionaire CEO and a thousand other industry heavyweights signed an open letter at the end of last month demanding a six-month halt to AI development. Companies, they suggested, are engaging in a “dangerous race” by rapidly developing this technology without fully understanding the risks.
Mr. Musk has recently acquired 10,000 GPUs for his site. This powerful hardware can execute the intricate mathematical calculations needed to produce visual content. Each GPU costs around $10,000. Tesla’s CEO has also hired two of the best minds at DeepMind.
Large language models (LLMs) are artificial intelligence systems that learn to generate human-like replies from enormous amounts of text input, and their excellent processing power can be leveraged to speed up the training process.
According to anonymous sources, Mr. Musk’s current project involves an LLM but is still in its early phases of development. Yet, the ex-workers claim Mr. Musk’s latest purchases prove his ‘commitment’ to the project’s growth. He has purportedly spent tens of millions of dollars.
When asked about the decision to lay off 3,700 workers, he justified it by saying there is no choice when the company loses over four million dollars daily.
In February, he let go of another 200 workers, reducing Twitter’s staff to under 2,000 from a high of 7,500 when he took charge.
This week, the billionaire gave an extensive interview in which he defended the company’s decision to lay off thousands of workers and discussed the financial health of the social media giant.
In December, Mr. Musk tweeted that he had stopped OpenAI from accessing the vast amounts of data available on Twitter to train ChatGPT.
