Elon Musk launches new company xAI, set to build ChatGPT alternative

Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, and owner of Twitter, on Wednesday reported the presentation of new artificial intelligence company, xAI, with the goal to “understand the true nature of the universe.” As per the organization’s site, Musk and his group will share more data in a live Twitter Spaces chat on Friday.

The xAI team is made up of former employees of DeepMind, OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research, Twitter, and Tesla. They have worked on projects like AlphaCode, which is part of DeepMind, and GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, which are part of OpenAI. Musk appears to be positioning xAI to compete with OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, which are responsible for leading chatbots such as ChatGPT, Bard, and Claude.

In April, the Financial Times reported on the startup and reported that Musk had obtained thousands of GPU processors from Nvidia to power a potential large language model. That very month, Musk shared subtleties of his plans for another man-made intelligence device called “TruthGPT” during a taped meeting on Fox News Channel, adding that he dreaded existing man-made intelligence organizations are prioritizing systems that are “politically correct.”

Dan Hendrycks, executive director of the Center for AI Safety, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that published a letter signed by tech leaders in May asserting that “mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war,” will serve as one of the AI startup’s advisors.

The letter was criticized by a number of academics and ethicists who held the opinion that focusing too much on AI’s growing power and its potential threats in the future is distracting from the actual harms that some algorithms cause marginalized communities right now, rather than in an undetermined future.

As per Greg Yang, fellow benefactor of xAI, the startup will dive into the “mathematics of deep learning,” a facet of AI, and “develop the ‘theory of everything’ for large neural networks” to take AI “to the next level.”

Musk supposedly consolidated xAI in Nevada in Spring. Beforehand, he had changed the name of Twitter to “X Corp.” in a few monetary filings, yet on xAI’s site, the organization noticed its partition from X Corp., adding that it will “work closely with X (Twitter), Tesla, and other companies to make progress towards our mission.”