Elon Musk is assembling a team to develop a competitor to ChatGPT

A report by The Information on Monday quoted people familiar with the matter as saying that Elon Musk has approached AI researchers in recent weeks about setting up a new research lab to develop an alternative to OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

The report stated that Musk, the head of Tesla and Twitter, is communicating with Igor Babushkin, a researcher who recently left Alphabet’s DeepMind artificial intelligence unit.

The report comes after ChatGBT, a text chatbot developed by OpenAI that can craft prose, poetry or even scripts if asked, gained widespread attention in Silicon Valley.

Musk, who co-founded OpenAI with Silicon Valley investor Sam Altman in 2015 as a non-profit startup, left its board in 2018, but has expressed interest in his stake in the chatbot, describing it as “frighteningly good”.

The report quoted Babushkin as saying in an interview that he and Musk are discussing forming a team to pursue artificial intelligence research, but the project is still in its early stages, with no concrete plan to develop specific products.

Babushkin added that he did not formally sign off on Musk’s initiative, according to the report.

Musk and Babushkin could not immediately be reached for comment.