After months of teasing that he was working on building a new AI company to rival OpenAIs ChatGPT, Elon Musk launches xAI.
The CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, and owner of Twitter was a co-founder and an early funder of OpenAI, the San Francisco-based research lab, but parted ways with the company in 2018. Since then, he’s publicly criticized OpenAI’s business model and its relationship with Microsoft.
The announcement of the new company came by way of a Tweet on Wednesday.
The website, also launched on the same day, unveiled the team behind the new company, led by Musk, with the goal to “understand the true nature of the universe.”
Musk’s announcement of the new company comes just months after he warned in an interview that he thinks AI could cause “civilization destruction” and joined other tech leaders in calling for a pause in the rapid development of AI.
Dan Hendrycks, who currently serves as the director of the Center for AI Safety, is listed as one of xAI’s advisors.
Other team members behind the xAI project includes those having previously worked at DeepMind, OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research, Twitter and Tesla, and have been part of projects, like DeepMind’s AlphaCode and OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 chatbots.
Greg Yang, a co-founder of xAI, said in a Tweet on Wednesday, that the start up’s mission is to explore “the ‘theory of everything’ for large neural networks” which will “be central to taking AI to the next level.”As to what that means exactly, few other details on the company’s mission are available, but the company is holding a meet and greet during a Twitter Spaces chat on Friday, July 14th at 4pm.
