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Alphabet's former employee, Igor Babuschkin, may soon be teaming up with tech mogul Elon Musk to develop an alternative to OpenAI's ChatGPT. The Information reported that Musk has been in talks with Babuschkin, who recently left Alphabet's DeepMind AI unit, to form a new research lab. Elon Musk is looking for AI researchers to build a new team.
The lab aims to take on OpenAI's text-based chatbot, which has gained attention for its ability to draft poetry, prose, and even computer code. Musk was one of the co-founders of OpenAI in 2015 and it began as a nonprofit startup. Musk left its board in 2018 but praised ChatGPT's impressive capabilities.
According to the report, the project is still in the early stages. However, Elon Musk and Babuschkin have discussed assembling a team to pursue AI research.
Babuschkin has worked with Google's Deepmind AI venture. He completed two stints at the Google subsidiary which was acquired in the year 2014. In his second stint at Deepmind, Babuschkin was the Senior Staff Research Engineer.
Elon Musk and OpenAI
In 2015, Elon Musk and Sam Altman joined hands with other stakeholders to form OpenAI. The platform was built as a non-profit organisation and the stakeholders decided to put in $1 billion investment in the platform. The company had decided to "freely collaborate" with other interested parties. The company even decided to let the research and patents stay open to others.
In 2018, Musk decided to resign from his position as a board member of OpenAI. He claimed that there could be a conflict of interest in the future as he builds AI tech for Tesla.
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