AI News roundup: Elon Musk wanted to run OpenAI, Is AI a misnomer and more

Is Artificial Intelligence a misnomer?

The term, AI, breeds misunderstanding and helps its creators avoid culpability.

• Artificial intelligence in particular conjures the notion of thinking machines. But no machine can think, and no software is truly intelligent. The phrase alone may be one of the most successful marketing terms of all time.


• These systems are trained to generate text that sounds plausible, yet they are marketed as new oracles of knowledge that can be plugged into search engines.

Twitter and Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, wanted to run OpenAI

Musk reportedly proposed the idea to his co-founders, who rejected it, prompting him to leave the company.

• In the early months of 2018, Elon Musk told Sam Altman, another OpenAI founder, that he would take control of OpenAI and run it himself as he believed the venture had 'fallen fatally behind Google', news website Semafor said, citing people familiar with the matter.


• Altman and OpenAI’s other founders rejected Musk’s proposal to run the company. Musk walked away from the company post that incident — and reneged on a massive planned donation on February 20, 2018.

Microsoft doesn't want AI rivals using the Bing search index

The company reportedly told two unnamed Bing-powered search engines that they cannot use the index as basis for their own AI chatbots.

• Microsoft has reportedly warned two search engines that use Bing's search index that it will cut off access to the index if they use it as a foundation for rival AI chatbots.


• While it is not clear which search engines have been warned, DuckDuckGo introduced its own GPT-based chatbot earlier this month.