On July 12, 2023, Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, founder and CEO of SpaceX, Telsa, and the current owner of Twitter, announced his next ambitions company “xAI”, an artificial intelligence company based on large-scale language models.
As per the official website of AI, the main objective of the xAI will be to “understand the true nature of the universe.” The team of the new company, xAI, includes esteemed researchers and employees from global Google’s DeepMind, OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research, Tesla, and reputed professors from the University of Toronto who have spent years in the field of artificial intelligence.
These individuals have also immensely contributed to the development of several other chatbots, including AlphaStar, AlphaCode, Inception, Minerva, GPT-3.5, and GPT-4. According to the Financial Times, Musk has been trying to launch his company since March and was holding discussions with Space Exploration Technologies Corp. and Tesla to fund his highly ambitious venture.
The same month, Jared Birchall and Musk incorporated a business called “x.AI” and purchased thousands of powerful processors from Nvidia Corp. for the operation of his company. For a long time, Musk has been a critic of the unregulated development and use of artificial intelligence and has repeatedly expressed his concern about the destruction of civilization that it could bring if not controlled or regulated.
Speaking on the risk, he said his company, xAI, is built to understand the true nature of the universe and will prioritize pro-humanity action. Furthermore, Musk said that he is creating “maximally curious” AI that is safe and user-friendly.
Dan Hendrycks, the executive director of the Center for AI Safety, will be one of the AI startup’s advisors. The company is said to work closely with X (Twitter), Tesla, and X Crop; however, it will be separate from all of them. More details about the company will be shared during a Twitter Spaces chat on Friday, July 14th.