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Erik Voorhees, an OG Bitcoiner and the CEO at the ShapeShift cryptocurrency exchange, has taken to his account on the X social media platform to reveal his new product — a rival of Elon Musk’s Grok and OpenAI’s ChatGPT AI bots.

Earlier this week, Voorhees criticized the Grok chatbot for being centralized and closed-source.

Voorhees has created his own AI Venice together with a former Binance executive.

Grok rival Venice AI

In a tweet thread, Voorhees stated that he and his team have launched Venice AI “for the purpose of unfettered civilizational advancement.”

He claimed that his product is similar to Grok, ChatGPT and other similar AIs but “without all the Orwellian stuff.” Voorhees explained what he meant by this, claiming that Venice does not spy on its users, it does not censor conversations and “doesn’t inject bias, safetyism, or political propaganda.”

“Venice gives you direct and unfiltered communication with machine intelligence,” the Venice creator added. So far, the product helps users to generate text, images and computer code. Similarly to Elon Musk, Erik Voorhees tweeted that Venice was created specially to support free speech: “Free speech = human flourishing.”

Voorhees and former crypto executive building Venice

The team behind Venice consists of Voorhees himself, an anonymous chief technology officer and Teana Baker-Taylor — a former executive at Binance, HSBC and Circle. Plus there is a small but powerful team of developers, Voorhees tweeted.

Earlier this week, Voorhees tweeted under a post by Musk about Grok that this chatbot remains centralized and closed-source. He then began to promote Venice AI.

However, a Bitcoin proponent Jeff Kirdeikis tweeted in response that he had tried using Venice but it turned out no better than OpenAI’s ChatGPT “when asked about many controversial topics.”