Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, on Wednesday, announced that he has formed a new artificial intelligence (AI) company called “xAI” whose goal is to “understand the true nature of the universe.”
The start-up, xAI, comprises a team of 12 people, including Musk. The xAI team has employees who have previously worked for other AI companies such as DeepMind, OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research, Tesla, and the University of Toronto.
The team also includes engineers Igor Babuschkin and Manuel Kroiss, who were hired by Musk in early March.
Further, the company said it would be advised by Dan Hendrycks, who currently serves as the Director of the Center for AI Safety, a nonprofit advocating for the proper regulation of AI.
xAI will be independent of Twitter’s new parent company, X Corp. but will work closely with X (Twitter), Tesla, and other companies “to make progress towards our mission,” according to the new company’s website.
Announcing formation of @xAI to understand reality
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 12, 2023
The company’s website also added that xAI is actively looking for new employees. “We are actively recruiting experienced engineers and researchers to join our team as members of our technical staff in the Bay Area,” it wrote.
In a separate tweet, Musk also hinted why he chose July 12, 2023, to announce the debut of xAI. The said date is related to a science fiction classic, Douglas Adams’ “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.”
He noted that adding the date 7-12-23 (July 12, 2023) equals to 42, which is the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything, as famously stated in the novel.
And what are the most fundamental unknown questions?
Once you know the right question to ask, the answer is often the easy part, as my hero, Douglas Adams, would say. pic.twitter.com/Bo6v8E1Ooq
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 12, 2023
Musk and the xAI team have announced an event on Friday, July 14th, via a Twitter Spaces chat where they will interact with the audiences and answer questions about the new company and its workings.
For those unaware, Musk has for months been hinting at creating an alternative AI product, especially after the launch of OpenAI’s popular chatbot ChatGPT, stating it had a liberal bias.
According to him, tech giants like Microsoft and Google are too focused on profitability and apathetic about AI safety.
In April 2023, Musk, in an interview with Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, said that he wants to develop his own chatbot called TruthGPT, which will be “a maximum truth-seeking AI”.
He wants to create a third alternative option to OpenAI and Google with an aim to “create more good than harm,” he added.
“I’m going to start something which you call TruthGPT or a maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe. And I think this might be the best path to safety in the sense that an AI that cares about understanding the universe is unlikely to annihilate humans because we are an interesting part of the universe,” Musk said during the Fox & Friends show.
