On 12th July (local time), billionaire and Tesla chief Elon Musk announced the formation of a new company focused on Artificial Intelligence (AI). Musk had been hinting at building a rival to ChatGPT for a long time. The company has been named xAI and has a team of a dozen of staff members on its website, with Musk as the chief.
According to the website, xAI’s main goal is to understand the true nature of the universe. The team members of the newly formed AI company have worked with several companies like DeepMind, OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research, Tesla, and the University of Toronto. Collectively, they have contributed to several projects, including Adam Optimizer, Batch Normalisation, Layer Normalisation and the discovery of adversarial examples.
Furthermore, the company has worked on introducing innovative techniques and analyses, including Transformer-XL, Autoformalization, the Memorizing Transformer, Batch Size Scaling, and μTransfer. The team members have experience in the development of AI projects, including AlphaStar, AlphaCode, Inception, Minerva, GPT-3.5, and GPT-4.
Notably, Musk was an early backer of ChatGPT-creator OpenAI. However, later he criticised the company for inputting safeguards to prevent the chatbot from generating biased or sexist responses. In December 2022, he tweeted, “The danger of training AI to be woke – in other words, lie – is deadly” while responding to a Twitter user who had asked OpenAI’s CEO if it was possible to “turn off the woke settings” on the chatbot platform ChatGPT.
In April 2023, during an interview with former-Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Musk hinted at the plans for a new AI venture. He said, “We’re going to start something which I call TruthGPT.” He described it as a “maximum truth-seeking AI that cares about understanding the universe.”
A few months ago, during an interview, he opined that AI could cause the destruction of civilization and called for a pause on an “out of control” race in the field of Artificial Intelligence.
Apart from Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, and The Boring Company, followed by social media platform Twitter, Musk now owns an AI platform that may raise the bar much higher for the players in the industry.
The announcement of the new company came at a time when Twitter was seeing a new rival in the market in the form of Threads by Instagram, which was launched on 6th July.