Elon Musk launched AI company xAI when he wanted to take on OpenAI By Reuters
© Reuters. FILE PHOTO: Elon Musk, Chief Executive Officer of SpaceX and Tesla and owner of Twitter, gestures while attending the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at the Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, France, June 16, 202
(Reuters) -Elon Musk, billionaire entrepreneur, launched his long-teased artificial intelligence startup xAI on Wednesday, introducing a team of engineers from the same major US tech companies he hopes to challenge in his quest to build alternatives to ChatGPT.
The startup will be led by Musk, who is already CEO of electric car maker Tesla (NASDAQ 🙂 , CEO of rocket launch company SpaceX and owner of Twitter, who has said on several occasions that AI development must be paused and the sector needs regulation. Musk has repeatedly raised concerns about AI’s potential for “civilizational collapse”.
During a Twitter Spaces event Wednesday night, Musk outlined his plans for building safer AI. Rather than explicitly programming morality into its AI, xAI will strive to create “highly curious” AI, he said.
“When it comes to trying to understand the true nature of the universe, that’s actually the best thing I can come up with from an AI security standpoint,” Musk said. “I think it’s going to be pro-humanitarian from the point of view that humanity is much more interesting than non-humanity.”
Musk also predicts that super intelligence, or AI that is smarter than humans, will arrive in five or six years.
Musk co-founded OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, in 2015, but stepped down from the company’s board in 2018.
Microsoft (NASDAQ:) is an investor in OpenAI.
The xAI site says it will be holding a Twitter Spaces event on July 14th.
The team at xAI includes Igor Babuschkin, former engineer at Google’s DeepMind; Tony Wu, who works at Google (O:); Christian Szegedy, who is also a research scientist at Google; and Greg Yang, who previously worked at Microsoft.
Musk in March registered a company called X.AI Corp, incorporated in Nevada, according to state filings. The company lists Musk as sole director and Jared Birchall, managing director of the Musk family office, as secretary.
Musk had said in April that he would launch TruthGPT, or maximum truth-seeking AI to rival Bard Google and Microsoft’s Bing AI trying to understand the nature of the universe.
Generative AI took center stage with the launch of popular chatbot ChatGPT OpenAI, which came in November last year, ahead of the launch of Bard and Bing AI.
Dan Hendrycks, who will advise the xAI team, is currently the director of the Center for AI Security and his work revolves around AI risks.
Musk’s new company is separate from X Corp, but will work closely with Twitter, Tesla and other companies, according to the website.
xAI says it is recruiting experienced engineers and researchers in the San Francisco Bay Area.
