Elon Musk has officially joined the AI race with the launch of a new company named xAI – after years of claiming the tech will be the demise of humanity.
The Twitter boss has not shared many details but revealed xAI was designed ‘to understand the true nature of the universe.’
The xAI team includes members who previously worked at DeepMind, OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research and Tesla.
The company’s sparse website notes include that more information will be shared in a live Twitter Space on Friday.
Elon Musk announced Wednesday a new AI company he calls xAI. The Twitter boss has not shared details, but the company aims to understand the universe
‘Announcing formation of @xAI to understand reality,’ Musk said in a tweet at 12:23pm ET.
He then shared another post highlighting how the date of xAI’s release is to honor Douglas Adams’ ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.’
When adding up the month, day and year, you get ’42.’
The number is the answer given by a supercomputer to ‘the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.’
Musk wrote: ‘And what are the most fundamental unknown questions? Once you know the right question to ask, the answer is often the easy part, as my hero, Douglas Adams, would say.’
The Tesla CEO registered a firm named X.AI Corp in March, incorporated in Nevada, according to a state filing.
The firm lists Musk as the sole director and Jared Birchall, the managing director of Musk’s family office, as a secretary.
And the company’s official Twitter account went live in May – but somehow managed to stay under the radar.
Many of the founding members are skilled with large language models.
The xAI team includes Igor Babuschkin, a DeepMind researcher, Zihang Dai, a research scientist at Google Brain and Toby Pohlen, also from DeepMind.
Musk has been one to criticize AI over the years, with his most notable attack on the tech in March when he and more than 1,000 other industry leaders called for a pause on the ‘dangerous race’ to develop AI, which they fear poses a ‘profound risk to society and humanity’ and could have ‘catastrophic’ effects.
Musk used Twitter to announce xAI. Many of the founding members are skilled with large language models
The group signed an open letter asking for a six-month pause, so more risk assessment can be done.
And the Twitter boss signed another in 2015 with the late Stephen Hawking, which warned that without safeguards on intelligent machines, mankind could be heading for a dark future.
Although Musk has been a major critic of AI, he did reveal in April that he had plans to launch ‘the third option’ to Microsoft and Google, called ‘TruthGPT.’
The announcement was made to Tucker Carlson.
Due to Musk’s belief in free speech, the new bot product could have less left-wing bias than ChatGPT, which has already been criticized for ‘woke’ responses.
He also accused Larry Page, co-founder of Google, of not taking AI safety seriously.
However, the billionaire also reiterated his warnings about AI during the interview with Carlson, saying, ‘AI is more dangerous than mismanaged aircraft design or production maintenance or bad car production’ according to the excerpts.
‘It has the potential of civilizational destruction,’ he said.
xAI is not Musk’s first AI company, as he co-founded OpenAI in 2015 but stepped down from the company’s board in 2018. In 2019, he tweeted that he left OpenAI because he had to focus on Tesla and SpaceX.
