Elon Musk on AI bandwagon: Tesla owner recruiting team to develop ChatGPT rival

Elon Musk has approached AI researchers in recent weeks about forming a new research lab to develop an alternative to OpenAI's ChatGPT, Reuters cited a report in US tech business publication Information as saying on Monday

The report, which cited people with direct knowledge of the effort, said Tesla and Twitter chief Musk has been recruiting Igor Babuschkin, a researcher who recently left Alphabet's DeepMind AI unit.

The report comes after ChatGPT, a text-based chatbot developed by OpenAI, that can draft prose, poetry or even computer code on command, gained widespread attention in Silicon Valley.

Musk, who had co-founded OpenAI along with Silicon Valley investor Sam Altman in 2015 as a non-profit start-up, had left its board in 2018, but chimed in with his take on the chatbot, calling it "scary good".

Musk and Babuschkin have discussed assembling a team to pursue AI research but the project is still in the early stages, with no concrete plan to develop specific products, the report said quoting an interview with the latter.