Tesla CEO Elon Musk has unveiled a new artificial intelligence company called xAI. Musk’s xAI comes after numerous tech companies began pushing out large language models such as ChatGPT, Bard and Llama.
The X (formerly Twitter – see end of article) CEO announced that xAI was created to, “Understand reality.” And from the xAI website, the company’s goal is seemingly to, “Understand the true nature of the universe.”
Musk’s new AI company currently has a team of 12 individuals including the SpaceX man and others with experience across various firms such as DeepMind, OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research and Tesla.
Dan Hendrycks, director of the nonprofit Center for AI Safety is also acting as an advisor for xAI. The platform’s most recent tweet – or should that be ‘X’? – asked, “What best describes your view for a positive future on a long time horizon?”
Great summary https://t.co/s2QE9zuzp4
— xAI (@xai) July 15, 2023
Musk and his xAI team hosted a Twitter space on July 14th where they discussed the company’s plans with xAI. An extensive summary of the discussion reveals that Musk’s goal with xAI is to build a good AGI (artificial general intelligence) to understand the universe.
Building AGI
Musk also said that the safest way is to build an AGI that is ‘maximum curious’ and ‘truth curious,’ and to try and minimise the error between what we think is true and what is actually true.
xAI will also work with Tesla in multiple ways and it will be of mutual benefit. Tesla’s self-driving capabilities will be enhanced because of xAI. He also adds that xAI is being built to compete with OpenAI.
Following the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022 and GPT-4 in March, major tech companies have wasted no time in rolling out generative AI tools to the public. In February, Microsoft entered the AI chatbot space by leveraging GPT-4 in Bing, while Google followed suit with its own AI Bard. Meta also joined the race with its Llama LLM.
Despite starting his own AI company, Musk was initially among the industry experts who penned an open letter urging a six-month pause on AI development citing, “Profound risk” to society.
However, Musk is now looking to compete with other AI labs and thinks that Ray Kurzweil’s prediction of AGI by 2029 is pretty accurate and that AGI could exist in a year, give or take.
Twitter is dead! Long live X
The news of the launch of xAI came in the lead-up to Twitter rebranding to become known simply as ‘X’. This new name reflects Musk’s long-held ambition to create X as an ‘everything app’.
Twitter was acquired by X Corp both to ensure freedom of speech and as an accelerant for X, the everything app. This is not simply a company renaming itself, but doing the same thing.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 25, 2023
The Twitter name made sense when it was just 140 character messages going back and forth – like…
Isa Muhammad is a writer and video game journalist covering many aspects of entertainment media including the film industry. He's steadily writing his way to the sharp end of journalism and enjoys staying informed. If he's not reading, playing video games or catching up on his favourite TV series, then he's probably writing about them.
