New Delhi: Tesla chief Elon Musk has announced the launch of his new company, xAI, which ventures into the artificial intelligence sector.
Musk, who had hinted on creating a rival to OpenAI’s ChatGPT months ago, announced the formation of xAI through Twitter. The company’s goal is to “understand the true nature of the universe”.
In a Twitter Spaces event Wednesday evening, Musk explained his plan for building a safer AI. Rather than explicitly programming morality into its AI, xAI will seek to create a “maximally curious” AI, he said.
“If it tried to understand the true nature of the universe, that’s actually the best thing that I can come up with from an AI safety standpoint,” Musk said. “I think it is going to be pro-humanity from the standpoint that humanity is just much more interesting than not-humanity.”
Musk and his team will share more information about the company during Twitter live spaces on Friday.
The people behind xAI come from a diverse background. The team has alumnis from DeepMind, OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research, Twitter and Tesla, and has worked on projects including DeepMind’s AlphaCode and OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 chatbots.
The SpaceX chief had initially made the announcement about his new venture in April as reported by The Financial Times. Following this, there were reports about Musk securing thousands of GPU processors from Nvidia to power a potential large-language model.
According to Greg Yang, a Microsoft researcher and co-founder of xAI, the company will research the “mathematics of deep learning”, a subset of AI, and “develop the ‘theory of everything’ for large neural networks” in order to advance AI “to the next level”.
According to a Nevada state filing with the Secretary of State, Musk and Jared Birchall, who runs Musk’s family office, incorporated xAI in March.
In a taped interview with Fox News Channel, Musk has said existing AI systems were “politically correct”. He further talked about launching the AI platform “TruthGPT” that would enable users to get a deeper understanding of topics.
Dan Hendrycks, who will advise the xAI team, is currently director of the Center for AI Safety and his work revolves around the risks of AI.
The tech giant’s swift entry into the AI industry has raised eyebrows. With the introduction of xAI it would expand Musk’s diverse portfolio of companies which include Tesla, Twitter. rocket maker SpaceX, neurotechnology researcher Neuralink, and tunneling start-up The Boring Company.
Musk, who had predicted the onset of AI that is smarter than humans in next five to six years, was co-founder of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, in 2015, but stepped down from the company’s board in 2018.
With inputs from Reuters
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