The tech mogul's fervent belief in an AI apocalypse may limit the industry's lax policies.
Musk and Trump have reportedly long focused on AI. He was an early investor in Google's DeepMind and is a co-founder of OpenAI, currently running xAI, which has raised over $6 billion to build powerful AI models.
Despite all evidence suggesting that both Trump and Musk wish to create a lax regulatory environment for AI companies to accelerate R&D, the variable in all of this is Musk's personal creed. He has long been concerned about the impact of AI on humanity as it becomes more powerful. In 2015, he co-founded the non-profit organization OpenAI because he feared that Google's acquisition of DeepMind would lead to AI technology being monopolized by a single company, as AI has surpassed human intelligence and such powerful technology is easily misused.
Musk later founded Neuralink, partly to help humanity stay ahead of any artificial superintelligence that might annihilate humanity. 'We need to get there before AI takes over.' For years, his pessimistic view of AI has been so deeply rooted that he severed his friendship with Google co-founder Larry Page. Last year, Musk told CNBC's David Farber, 'The last straw was when Larry called me a speciesist for supporting human consciousness over machine consciousness.'
Musk may be a sensitive narcissist, but he is also a purist; for him, money is a means to achieve greater goals, and he places ideology and self over economic interests. For example, Musk's acquisition of Twitter has helped him cultivate valuable influence among Republicans and Trump himself, even though the company's value has significantly declined and advertisers have largely fled. Trump has said little regarding AI, one of which is his promise to rescind the AI executive order issued by President Biden in 2023, which stipulates that standards organizations such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology will check whether tech companies are developing AI safely and ethically.
But if Musk gains a unique position in shaping national rules for artificial intelligence, he may want to leverage this advantage to realize his vision. This would satisfy his ego more than relaxing AI regulatory rules, as easing regulations benefits xAI, Tesla, and his competitors. With this in mind, if Trump indeed follows through on his promise to rescind Biden's executive order, he may require tech companies to still conduct safety checks on their models. Additionally, restrictions on chatbot speech will also be relaxed.
Trump has stated that he hopes to see AI development 'rooted in free speech,' while Musk, who despises the so-called 'woke thinking virus,' also believes that AI models are subject to excessive censorship. In fact, most chatbots outside of xAI's Grok are meticulously designed and very cautious about their speech.
A recent study conducted by academic researchers from ETH Zurich, LatticeFlow AI, and the Institute of Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, and Technology found that the largest large language models produced by companies like Google, OpenAI, and Meta scored high in preventing robots from spreading harmful or toxic content.
Musk's concerns about an AI apocalypse do not make him a reliable candidate for AI policy. Just look at what happened to Twitter during his management. Malicious rhetoric against immigrants and people of color flourished on Twitter, making it an unwelcome place for marginalized groups, and conspiracy theories spread easily, often thanks to Musk's own posts. The tech industry needs to establish rules to prevent AI from spiraling out of control in the future, but according to research from ETH and LatticeFlow, today's models are also rife with gender and racial biases. Qualifying any efforts to address this issue as 'censorship' could exacerbate fairness issues in AI systems more than they are now. This could lead to more covert harms from AI in the near future.
