Elon Musk launches xAI to challenge dominance of ChatGPT owner

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Elon Musk has formally launched xAI, an artificial intelligence company that aims to challenge the dominance of Sam Altman’s OpenAI and “understand the true nature of the universe”.

The company will be led by Musk and include a team hired from other leading AI research labs, including DeepMind’s Igor Babushkin and researchers from Microsoft and OpenAI.

The Twitter owner and Tesla and SpaceX boss has also acquired thousands of GPU processors from Nvidia, which are needed to build large language models that consume vast amounts of content.

The Financial Times first reported Musk’s plans for an AI company in April as he sought to link up with OpenAI, which has prompted growing interest in the area since the launch of its ChatGPT chatbot in November.

Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015, but left it in 2018 after clashing with management over its approach to AI security, according to people at the company at the time.

In the past year, as Musk focused on generating returns from his $44 billion purchase of Twitter, OpenAI, Google and generic AI companies including Anthropic, Adept and StabilityAI have rolled out a range of increasingly sophisticated models.

Those advances have helped drive sector star OpenAI’s valuation into the tens of billions and put AI models, which for years have been the preserve of researchers, into the hands of consumers.

It’s unclear how or whether Musk would like to commercialize his own AI research efforts. There are very few details on the company’s website other than that it has a dozen-strong, all-male founding team. On Twitter, Musk wrote that xAI was being formed to “understand reality”, he did not provide any further details.

Earlier this year Musk was the most prominent signatory of any open letter called on OpenAI and other companies leading AI research to “immediately freeze for at least six months”.

The letter said that training anything more powerful than the ChatGPT4 chatbot released by Altman’s company in March could exacerbate the “serious risks to society and humanity” already posed by AI.

XAI will be advised by Dan Hendrix, director of the Center for AI Safety, which aims to “mitigate societal-level risks associated with AI”.

But many in the AI ​​community have expressed skepticism about the timing of Musk’s intervention. According to business records, two weeks before the publication of the open letter, Musk and Jared Birchell, the former Morgan Stanley banker who manages his assets, formed a company called X.AI in Nevada.

According to its website, xAI will be separate from the rest of Musk’s empire, but will work closely with Twitter and Tesla.