Elon Musk Unveils Ambitious xAI Initiative to Tackle Difficult Scientific Challenges

Elon Musk, the executive chair and CTO of Twitter, recently conducted a live audio session to discuss xAI, an artificial intelligence project he had announced just two days prior through a tweet. This is notable because Musk has previously expressed his opposition towards AI. In the Twitter Spaces chat, Musk revealed his intention to develop a high-quality artificial general intelligence (AGI). He emphasized that xAI will differ from other AI platforms as its primary objective is to comprehend the true nature of events.

Expanding on his thoughts, Musk explained that XAI aims to solve complex scientific and mathematical problems in the world and through them tries to understand the universe better. At one point he even asked the question, “Why isn’t there massive evidence of aliens?”, giving a hint about what kinds of things xAI could be used to investigate. However, how it can examine them was not answered.

Another interesting insight into the reason for starting the company came from founder Kyle Kosic, who previously worked at OpenAI. He said, “The reason I’m particularly excited about xAI is that I think the biggest danger in AI is monopolization by a few,” hinting that the company is trying to increase competition in the AI sector.

Musk himself admitted that XAI definitely competes with OpenAI, which is behind the GPT technology. Interestingly, Musk himself was an early investor in the company.

XAI uses data from public tweets for training

During the session, Musk also addressed the issue of big data scraping, claiming that “every AI organization on Earth” has illegally used Twitter data to train their models.

He explained why adding Twitter restrictions on viewing tweets became necessary for the company. He said: “We had multiple entities scraping every tweet that was ever made and basically trying to do it over the course of days. So this brought the system to its knees. So we had to take action.” He also apologized for the inconvenience caused by the price restriction.

Musk also revealed that xAI is being trained on public tweets. He said: “I think we use public tweets, nothing private of course, also for education. Just like basically everyone else.” He added that Twitter data is attractive for text training as well as image and video training.

Not an “awakened” chatbot

During the session, Musk emphasized that the generative AI that xAI might release is not “politically correct,” alluding to popular chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Bing AI, and Google’s Bard.

“I think our AI can give answers that people might find controversial, even though they are true,” he said.