Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, has announced the launch of a new AI company called xAI. The goal of the company, according to its website, is to understand the true nature of the universe. Musk and his team will be sharing more information about xAI in a live Twitter Spaces chat on Friday.
The team behind xAI consists of experts who have previously worked at companies like DeepMind, OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research, Twitter, and Tesla. They have been involved in projects such as DeepMind's AlphaCode and OpenAI's GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 chatbots. Musk appears to be positioning xAI as a competitor to companies like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, which are behind leading chatbots like ChatGPT, Bard, and Claude.
Reports about the startup were previously published by The Financial Times, which also mentioned that Musk had secured thousands of GPU processors from Nvidia to power a potential large language model. In an interview on Fox News Channel, Musk shared details about his plans for a new AI tool called "TruthGPT" and expressed concerns that existing AI companies prioritize systems that are "politically correct."
One of xAI's advisors is Dan Hendrycks, the executive director of the Center for AI Safety. In May, the Center published a letter signed by tech leaders, including Musk, warning about the risks of AI and calling for global prioritization of mitigating those risks.
However, this letter received pushback from some academics and ethicists who believe that too much focus on AI's future threats distracts from the harm caused by algorithms in marginalized communities today.
According to Greg Yang, co-founder of xAI, the startup will focus on the mathematics of deep learning and aim to develop the "theory of everything" for large neural networks to advance AI to the next level.
xAI was incorporated in Nevada in March, and although Musk had changed the name of Twitter to "X Corp" in some financial filings, xAI's website clarifies that it is separate from X Corp and will collaborate closely with Twitter, Tesla, and other companies to progress towards its mission.
This is a breaking news story, and further updates are expected.