Elon Musk launched xAI – an artificial intelligence firm – to compete with Sam Altman’s OpenAI. The company aims to “understand the nature of the universe” and challenge its dominance.
The company, led by Musk, will employ a team of researchers and scientists from leading AI labs. This includes Igor Babuschkin and Microsoft.
The Tesla and SpaceX boss, as well as the Twitter owner, has secured thousands of Nvidia GPU processors. These are needed to create large language models and consume huge amounts of content.
In April, the first report Musk’s plans to create an AI company was published. He wanted to catch up OpenAI which had been generating interest in the AI sector ever since its ChatGPT bot launched in November.
Musk co-founded OpenAI back in 2015. He left the company in 2018, after clashes over their AI safety approach, according to those who worked there at the time.
OpenAI, Google, and generative AI firms including Anthropic Adept, and StabilityAI launched a series increasingly sophisticated models in the last year. Musk was focused on generating returns from his 44% purchase of Twitter.
These advances have helped to propel the value of OpenAI, a sector leader, into the tens or even hundreds of billions. They have also allowed AI models that were previously the domain of researchers to be available for consumers.
Musk has not yet revealed how he will commercialise the results of his AI research. The website of the company contains few details, other than that its founding team is made up entirely of men. Musk said on Twitter that xAI is being formed in order to “understand the reality”, but provided no other details.
Musk was one of the prominent signatories to an Open Letter earlier this year, which called on OpenAI and other AI-focused companies to “immediately stop for at least six month”.
The letter warned that training anything more powerful than Altman’s ChatGPT4 bot, released in March by his company, could increase the “profound risks” AI poses to humanity and society.
Dan Hendrycks will advise xAI, the director of the Center for AI Safety. The Center for AI Safety aims to reduce “society-scale risks related to AI”.
Many in the AI community are sceptical about Musk’s timing. According to records, Musk and Jared Birchall (the ex-Morgan Stanley Banker who manages Musk’s wealth) incorporated X.AI, a Nevada company, two weeks before the publication of the open letter.
According to its website, xAI is separate from Musk’s other companies, but it will still work closely with Twitter, Tesla and others.