Elon Musk is recruiting a team to take on "woke" ChatGPT

Elon Musk has found his next target, and it is the very company he helped start.

According to a report from The Information, the billionaire is looking to build a new AI research lab to develop an alternative to ChatGPT. To lead the charge, Musk has reportedly been recruiting Igor Babuschkin, a machine learning scientist who recently left Google DeepMind and previously worked at OpenAI.

Musk co-founded OpenAI back in 2015 as a major financial backer, but walked away from its board in 2018 citing potential conflicts of interest with Tesla's own autonomous driving AI efforts. Now, he wants back in the large language model game.

Hunting for a less 'woke' bot

Musk initially praised ChatGPT when it debuted, calling it "scary good" and warning that we are not far from dangerously powerful AI.

That fascination quickly curdled into frustration on Twitter. Musk repeatedly flagged viral screenshots showing ChatGPT refusing to define what a woman is, praising Democratic politicians while dodging questions about Republicans, and declaring nuclear war less dangerous than racism. Musk called the behavior "extremely concerning" and decried the model as hopelessly "woke."

In mid-February, Musk floated the idea of building a "TruthGPT" focused on objective truth rather than prevailing social sensitivities.

Babuschkin noted that the effort is still in early stages with no concrete product roadmaps, and he has not officially signed on yet. But he did push back on the idea that Musk simply wants an unhinged chatbot with zero guardrails. According to Babuschkin, the real goal is to build an AI that can argue more soundly, act more objectively, and earn trust through reliability rather than arbitrary restrictions.

Why it matters

Musk's quest for an anti-woke chatbot was completely predictable after his free-speech-driven acquisition of Twitter. Large language models are shaping up to be the next major battleground for cultural and political influence, and Musk refuses to let OpenAI and Microsoft control the narrative.

For everyday users and developers, this means the AI race is rapidly splitting along ideological and philosophical lines. While you cannot test Musk's model anytime soon, his public campaign is already forcing existing players to address alignment bias.

We think Musk's critique resonates with anyone frustrated by over-sanitized AI guardrails, but building an "objective" LLM is vastly harder than tweeting about it. What Musk considers objective truth often looks a lot like his personal worldview, which introduces a whole different flavor of bias.

Meanwhile, OpenAI is not standing still. The company has already laid out plans to let users customize ChatGPT's personality and boundaries within broad social limits, alongside robust fine-tuning options through its Foundry platform. Musk is starting from scratch on team and compute, and catching up to OpenAI's operational velocity will be an uphill battle.