Elon Musk, the visionary entrepreneur behind Tesla, SpaceX and Twitter, has recently announced the formation of a new artificial intelligence company, called xAI. The company’s mission, as stated by Musk, is to “understand the true nature of the universe”.
What is xAI?
xAI is a separate entity from Musk’s other businesses, but will work closely with them, according to the company’s website. The company has hired a team of 12 researchers from top tech companies and institutions, such as Google, OpenAI, DeepMind, Microsoft Research and Twitter. The team has worked on projects such as DeepMind’s AlphaCode and OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 chatbots.
The company will also be advised by Dan Hendrycks, the executive director of the Center for AI Safety, a nonprofit that advocates for mitigating the risk of extinction from AI. Hendrycks has warned that AI could be used by malicious actors to design novel bioweapons or release rogue AI that could harm humanity.
xAI has not disclosed what specific projects it will be working on, but it has hinted that it will delve into the “mathematics of deep learning” and “develop the ‘theory of everything’ for large neural networks”. The company also seems to be positioning itself to compete with other leading AI companies, such as OpenAI, Google and Anthropic, which are behind popular chatbots like ChatGPT, Bard and Claude.
Why did Musk start xAI?
Musk has been vocal about his concerns and interests in AI for a long time. He has invested in and co-founded several AI-related ventures, such as Neuralink, which aims to create brain-computer interfaces, and OpenAI, which he later left due to disagreements over its direction. He has also expressed his fear that AI could pose an existential threat to humanity if not aligned with human values and goals.
In April 2023, Musk revealed his plans for a new AI tool called “TruthGPT” in an interview with Fox News Channel. He said that he was unhappy with the way AI was being developed by existing companies, which he claimed were prioritizing systems that were “politically correct”. He said that he wanted to create a “maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe”. He also said that he had secured thousands of GPU processors from Nvidia to power a potential large language model.
Musk chose July 12, 2023 as the date to announce xAI because of its connection to a science fiction classic, Douglas Adams’ “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”. In the novel, 42 is famously postulated as the answer to life. Musk tweeted that adding the date 7-12-23 equals 42, and that once you know the right question to ask, the answer is often the easy part.
What can we expect from xAI?
xAI is still a very new and mysterious company, so it is hard to predict what it will achieve or produce in the future. However, given Musk’s track record and ambition, we can expect xAI to be bold and innovative in its pursuit of understanding reality through AI.
The company has said that it will share more information in a live Twitter Spaces chat on Friday, July 14. Until then, we can only speculate and wonder what xAI will reveal next
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