Elon Musk is launching an artificial intelligence (AI) company called xAI.
“Announcing formation of @xAI to understand reality,” Musk wrote in a Wednesday (July 12) tweet.
The new company is led by Musk and its team includes veterans of DeepMind, OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research, Tesla and the University of Toronto, according to the xAI website.
Members of the team have contributed some of the most widely used methods in the field, introduced innovative techniques and analyses, and worked on and led the development of some of the largest breakthroughs in the field, the website said.
“The goal of xAI is to understand the true nature of the universe,” the firm said on its website.
The team will share more details in a Twitter Spaces Chat scheduled for Friday (July 14), per the site.
This is the sixth company Musk oversees, with the others being Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter, Neuralink and The Boring Company, Bloomberg reported Wednesday.
Musk has hinted for months that he wants to build an alternative to OpenAI’s AI-powered chatbot, ChatGPT, according to the report. He was involved in the creation of that company but left its board in 2018 and has been increasingly critical of OpenAI and cautious about developments around AI in general.
It was reported in April that Musk was quietly amassing the processors and engineers to create AI tech to rival that of ChatGPT.
“For the new project, Musk has secured thousands of high-powered GPU processors from Nvidia, according to people with knowledge of the move,” the Financial Times reported April 14. “GPUs are the high-end chips required for Musk’s aim to build a large language model — AI systems capable of ingesting enormous amounts of content and producing humanlike writing or realistic imagery, similar to the technology that powers ChatGPT.”
Days after that report, Musk told Tucker Carlson in an interview on Fox News that he wants to create a “maximum truth-seeking AI” and provide an alternative to OpenAI, which is closely aligned with Microsoft, and DeepMind, which is owned by Google.
“I think I will create a third option,” Musk said at the time.
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