Elon Musk has launched a new company, which wants to challenge ChatGPT in the field of generative artificial intelligence: it’s called xAI – and aims high. Presented via a new website, which provides detailed information on the company’s mission and team, and which says the main goal of xAI is to “understand the true nature of the universe”. There are no details or explanations on how to achieve this.
xAI, Elon Musk’s new artificial intelligence company
Musk tweeted that he “announce xAI training to understand reality” on Twitter. The CEO personally leads the xAI team, which includes experts from renowned AI organizations, such as OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research e DeepMind (recently incorporated into Google). Team members featured on the website include Igor Babuschkin, Manuel Kroiss, Yuhuai (Tony) Wu, Christian Szegedy, Jimmy Ba, Toby Pohlen, Ross Nordeen, Kyle Kosic, Greg Yang, Guodong Zhang and Zihang Dai.
On July 14, the @xAI team will organize a discussion on Twitter Spaces, offering listeners the opportunity to “meet the team and ask questions,” as noted on the website. An exact time has not been specified for the event.
This announcement on Twitter Spaces (certainly not the most popular streaming site) testifies to how this company also wants to bind hand in hand with the others of which Musk is the administrator or owner. According to the information reported on the xAI website, the company is “separate” from Musk’s X Corpbut will cooperate closely with X (Twitter), Tesla and other companies. Musk recently imposed severe but temporary limitations on reading Twitter, attributing them to changes in data mining by AI startups seeking information for large language models (LLM). Perhaps its xAI will not have the same limitations imposed on other algorithms.
A new scope
The first information about xAI emerged in April, when documents revealed that Musk had founded the company in Nevada. Musk has already played a major role in another AI organization, having co-founded OpenAI in 2015. However, in 2018 you left the organization to avoid conflicts of interest with Tesla, which is also active in the field of AI.
Since then, Musk has been a vocal critic of OpenAI and hinted at a new project called “TruthGPT” during an interview with Tucker Carlson, the host recently fired from Fox News. In fact, he had criticized the limits set by OpenAI to prevent AI from expressing sexist, racist or otherwise controversial “opinions”. Something that according to Musk limited the “search for truth” to which AI should tend. Although, as we know, generative AIs make sentences about probabilistic calculations based on datasets.
Musk also criticized the fact that OpenAI had moved from a non-profit to “controlled by Microsoft”. And more than once he had asked for moratoriums to evaluate the possible risks of this technology. Both fears seem to collide with the new private company he just launched – but we’ll get a better understanding of Elon Musk’s stance on xAI after tomorrow’s online event.