Elon Musk has spoken several times about artificial intelligence (AI) over the past few months. This week he announced the launch of xAI, a new company dedicated to the sector. What are the billionaire’s plans?
Elon Musk is launching xAI, a new company dedicated to artificial intelligence
Elon Musk’s brief announcement on Twitter shows the ambitions of the Tesla boss and Twitter. The billionaire that xAI will be used to “understand reality”, no less :
Announcing formation of @xAI to understand reality
– Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 12, 2023
The company brings together heavyweights in the artificial intelligence sector. The people recruited have a background at DeppMind, OpenAI, Google Reseach, or Microsoft Research :
“We have worked on and led the development of some of the industry’s biggest innovations, including AlphaStar, AlphaCode, Inception, Minerva, GPT-3.5 and GPT-4. “
It should also be remembered that Elon Musk was originally involved in the early days of OpenAI, before criticising the company’s model, and in particular the supposed influence of Microsoft, which invested billions in the project.
Are we developing artificial intelligence in a sensible way?
Elon Musk has also been critical of the rapid evolution of the sector, and has signed up to several calls to suspend the development of the biggest AI models, for fear that their consequences will escape their creators. With this in mind, xAI will be advised by Dan Hendrycks, the director of the non-profit Centre for AI Security.
For the moment there is little information about xAI’s first missions, beyond its ambition to “understand the true nature of the universe”. The press release states that the company will be working with Twitter, Tesla and Elon Musk’s other companies. It is not, however, a company under the umbrella of X Corp.
The xAI team will be holding an interview next Friday to better define the contours of this new project. This is the sixth major venture by Elon Musk, who is already at the helm of Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter, Neuralink and The Boring Company. Will xAI succeed in understanding “the nature of the universe”? That, of course, remains to be seen, but the sector is in full swing at the moment
