Is Elon Musk Really Going To Build His Own Search Engine
Google's image-generating AI, Gemini, made headlines recently when its creations were accused of working off a gender and racial bias, particularly with a set of racially-diverse Nazis. Among the AI's most prominent critics is X (formerly Twitter) owner Elon Musk. In an X post on February 23, 2024, Musk claimed he spoke directly to a senior executive at Google about Gemini's bias and was assured that "they are taking immediate action to fix the racial and gender bias." But that, Musk claims, is just the tip of the iceberg.
A senior exec at Google called and spoke to me for an hour last night.
He assured me that they are taking immediate action to fix the racial and gender bias in Gemini.
Time will tell.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 23, 2024
His backlash didn't stop with Gemini, and a recent reply to a follower's post suggests that Musk will also go after another of Google's flagship products: Gmail. But will Musk stop at just two Google products, or will he likely go all in and try to beat the search engine giant at its own game, especially after calling out the search engine for having its own issues?
Though self-proclaimed "Truth Slayers" like Tara Bull have posed the question, and Musk has remained critical of Google's alleged bias, there doesn't appear to be any movement on Musk's part to start his own search engine. At least, not yet.
Musk takes on Google
Though Musk had taken jabs at Google before, specifically noting issues with the platform's News page, his viper tongue has been taking lashes at the platform since the Gemini bias started to make traction. Since then, he's been actively pinpointing specific instances where Google's search has shown the same bias, such as when he prompted the engine with "why censorship..." Musk even went beyond lambasting the platform and started targeting employees of Google, including product lead Jack Krawczyk, who he accuses of being "a big part of why Google's AI is so racist & sexist."
I just typed in a Google query on my phone and the top two choices are pro censorship! pic.twitter.com/NC9nIi2GcV
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 22, 2024
In his flood of posts on X, Musk has called for firings at Google in response to the "insanely racist and sexist" Gemini image generator. In an alleged follow-up call with the unnamed Google executive, where it was revealed the fix for Gemini would take months, Musk claimed to have stated, "Unless those who caused this are exited from Google, nothing will change, except to make the bias less obvious and more pernicious."
And yet despite his growing concern over Google and his evident anger toward Gemini, he's remained silent on the potential for developing his own search engine. Maybe having failed to deliver on the AI search upgrade for X put into perspective the cost, staffing, and time needed to mimic Google's search engine success.
Musk's war against 'wokeness'
That Musk would even consider launching a so-called "anti-woke" search engine is not an altogether crazy concept. The billionaire and tech visionary has made a living off of new ideas and investments attempting to course-correct what he perceives as bias across many platforms. Since taking over X in April 2022, though, Musk has been a waterfall of ideas to create an internet in the image of his ideologies.
One of his first was TruthGPT, a "truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe" that he first teased in February 2023. This isn't to be confused with the TruthGPT chatbot, which claims to have been inspired by Musk but fails to really touch on what the OpenAI alternative was meant to be. As of February 2024, Elon's TruthGPT has yet to be released or receive further elaboration.
X did actively go after ChatGPT, though, with the launch of Grok for premium subscribers. The built-in AI is advertised as using real-time information to develop relative and logical answers. Despite Musk's attempts at veering away from what he considers woke ideologies creating a bias, in an early test of the service in December 2023, ZDNET contributor Lance Whitney found the bot leaned left on some topics. In fact, considering his track record, it's almost shocking that Musk isn't actively pursuing a search engine.