Tesla CEO Elon Musk officially enters the race for artificial intelligence
Elon Musk has formally introduced xAI, an artificial intelligence startup that seeks to "understand the true nature of the universe" and compete with Sam Altman's OpenAI.
Musk will serve as the company's CEO, while Igor Babuschkin from DeepMind and experts from Microsoft and OpenAI will be among the team members selected from other top AI research organizations.
The CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, as well as the owner of Twitter, has also purchased thousands of GPU processors from Nvidia, which are necessary to create substantial language models that consume a lot of stuff.
The Financial Times first reported Musk’s plans for an AI company in April as he sought to catch up with OpenAI, which has driven growing interest in the sector since the launch of its ChatGPT chatbot in November.
Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015, but left in 2018 after clashes with management around their approach to AI safety, according to people who were at the company at the time.
In the past year, with Musk focused on generating a return from his $44bn purchase of Twitter, OpenAI, Google and generative AI companies including Anthropic, Adept and StabilityAI have launched a series of increasingly sophisticated models.
Those advances have helped propel the valuation of sector star OpenAI into the tens of billions and placed AI models, which have for years been the preserve of researchers, into the hands of consumers.
It is not clear how or whether Musk will seek to commercialise his own AI research efforts. The company’s website carries scant details beyond that it has a dozen strong, all-male founding team. On Twitter, Musk wrote that xAI was being formed to “understand reality”, giving no further details.
Earlier this year Musk was the most prominent signatory of an open letter calling for OpenAI and other companies leading AI research to “immediately pause for at least six months”.
Training anything more powerful than the ChatGPT4 chatbot released by Altman’s company in March could exacerbate the already “profound risks to society and humanity” posed by AI, the letter said.
xAI will be advised by Dan Hendrycks, director of the Center for AI Safety, which aims to “reduce societal-scale risks associated with AI”.
But many in the AI community have expressed scepticism about the timing of Musk’s intervention. Two weeks before the open letter’s publication, Musk and Jared Birchall, the ex-Morgan Stanley banker who manages his wealth, incorporated a company called X.AI in Nevada, according to business records.
xAI will be separate from the rest of Musk’s empire, but will work closely with Twitter and Tesla, according to its website.
