The CEO has said that xAI wants to “understand reality.”
The person who owns Twitter and started Tesla and SpaceX said on Wednesday that he has created a company called xAI that uses artificial intelligence to try to figure out how the world works.
Musk wrote, “Announcing the formation of xAI to understand reality,” linking to the company’s brand-new profile on his social network.
xAI is a separate company from Musk’s X Corp. Still, it will work closely with his other businesses “to make progress towards our mission,” which is “to understand the true nature of the universe,” according to the company’s website.
People involved with xAI have worked at OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Tesla, and the University of Toronto in Canada. They say they have contributed to “some of the most widely used methods” in artificial intelligence and breakthroughs like the GPT chatbot.
After the xAI news, Tesla’s stock went up by 1.5%.
Public records show that xAI was formed in the US state of Nevada in March. Musk is the only director on the list. The company said that on Friday, there would be a Twitter Spaces chat where more information would be given.
Since then, people have made guesses about whether or not Musk plans to start an AI business. Business Insider reported that Musk bought many graphic processing units (GPUs) for a new generative AI service. The Financial Times has also written about Musk’s plans to start an AI company that will compete directly with OpenAI, backed by Microsoft. It has been said that Musk talked to SpaceX and Tesla investors to get money for the project.
Two weeks after starting xAI, Musk signed an open letter with more than 1,000 researchers and tech executives warning that AI could pose “profound risks to society and humanity.” In the letter, they asked for a world halt to AI development for six months to “give society a chance to adapt” to the fast-moving technology.
Musk has also talked about how AI could cause “civilizational destruction” and pointed to the race between ChatGPT and Bard as an example. Musk helped start the company that makes ChatGPT, OpenAI, in 2015. However, he quit OpenAI’s board of directors in 2018 and has since called the company a “closed source, maximum-profit company that Microsoft effectively controls.”
Dan Hendrycks, who runs the Centre for AI Safety, a non-profit that tries to reduce technology’s risks, is one of the top advisers that Musk has hired for xAI.
