Twitter and Tesla CEO Elon Musk has announced the formation of a new AI company, xAI.
Musk made the announcement on Twitter, alongside posting the xAI Twitter handle. The account already has more than 316,000 followers.
He says the company’s aim is to “understand reality”, while a newly launched website for the company offers a little more detail on what this actually means.
“The goal of xAI is to understand the true nature of the universe,” the site’s inaugural post reads.
What is xAI?
The xAI team is “led by Elon Musk”, which suggests he will be taking more than an advisory role in the new AI company.
xAI’s site also details the 11 other men who are the founding members — no women this time — including researchers and engineers who have previously worked on Google’s Minerva and GPT-4, the AI engine that powers ChatGPT.
The company will hold a discussion on Twitter Spaces on Friday, July 14. This is the platform’s voice-led discussion and presentation space, available to any Twitter user through the Android and iOS Twitter apps.
The time of this Twitter Spaces meeting has not yet been announced. xAI’s Twitter account and that of Elon Musk are the best places to get this detail, for those interested in attending.
From a distance, Musk may seem late to the party with xAI, but he has been involved in this space long before the explosion of public interest in late 2022, caused by the release of LLM-based chatbots.
Musk was one of the initial board members of OpenAI, alongside its current CEO Sam Altman and prolific tech investor Peter Thiel.
Musk left OpenAI’s board in 2018. A now-deleted blog on the OpenAI website explained Tesla’s increasing AI research, related to autonomous driving, created a “potential future conflict for Elon”, as reported by CNBC at the time.
Is AI safe?
The Tesla CEO has repeatedly called for regulation of AI, and was a key signatory of an open letter published in March 2023, asking for a six-month pause on the development of emerging AI tools.
“Recent months have seen AI labs locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no-one — not even their creators — can understand, predict, or reliably control,” the letter reads. It was published on the Future of Life Institute website.
Has Musk changed his mind on the state of AI safety? That remains to be seen. xAI will be supervised by Dan Hendrycks, who completed a PhD in computer science at UC Berkeley in 2022 and is research director at the Center for AI Safety, a non-profit established in 2022.
Hendrycks recently published a paper titled Natural Selection Favors AIs over Humans, that is available to read online.
