Elon Musk unveils new xAI chatbot technology

Elon Musk, who has been dropping hints for several months about his desire to create a rival to the widely used ChatGPT AI chatbot, has now revealed the establishment of xAI. This initiative aims to delve into the fundamental understanding of the universe.

In a website released Wednesday, XAI said its team is led by Musk and staffed by executives who have worked at several companies at the forefront of artificial intelligence, including Google’s DeepMind, Microsoft Corp. and Tesla Inc., as well as an academic expert. institutions such as the University of Toronto.

Musk co-founded OpenAI, the highest-profile AI startup and developer of ChatGPT. But he has been a frequent and public critic of OpenAI since he left the board in 2018, especially after it created a for-profit arm the following year. He has said he believes Microsoft is managing it effectively. Microsoft has invested about $13 billion in OpenAI.

Despite his AI work, Musk has expressed deep reservations about the technology. The billionaire was among a group of researchers and tech executives who in March urged developers to stop training powerful AI models.

Among the 12 men listed on the website Wednesday morning (including Musk) are University of Toronto assistant professor Jimmy Ba, who studied under artificial intelligence pioneer Geoffrey Hinton, and Christian Szegedy, who spent years working on artificial intelligence as a researcher at Google.

Although Musk is often critical of San Francisco, the xAI website says the company is “actively recruiting experienced engineers and scientists” to work “in the Bay Area.” So far, most of the artificial intelligence development has been concentrated in Silicon Valley.

Musk and Jared Birchall, who runs Musk’s family office, founded a company called X.AI in March, according to a filing with the Nevada Secretary of State.

In April, the Financial Times reported that Musk was in talks with investors from Tesla and Space Exploration Technologies Corp. to fund the AI startup, citing unidentified people familiar with the matter. According to the magazine, the billionaire has bought thousands of processors from Nvidia Corp. for a new project.

According to the XAI website, the company is being advised by Dan Hendrycks, who is the director of the Center for AI Safety, a group that has warned about the existential dangers of the rapid development of artificial intelligence. This spring, it issued a warning letter signed by the CEOs of some leading AI companies, including Alphabet Inc’s DeepMind and OpenAI.

Musk, 52, now oversees six companies: Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter, Neuralink, the Boring Co. and now xAI. In regulatory filings, Tesla says the auto giant is focusing “increasingly on products and services based on artificial intelligence, robotics and automation.” Tesla’s website invites people to help “build the future of artificial intelligence” with a range of products, from the “Tesla Bot” known as Optimus to AI interface chips that run the electric car maker’s automated driving software.

Musk has a long history of borrowing engineers from one company to help another as the contours of his ever-expanding empire bleed into each other. For example, Tesla and SpaceX share a vice president of materials engineering, and Tesla engineers “volunteered” to work at Twitter after Musk bought the company in October for $44 billion.

XAI’s website says it is a “separate company from X Corp,” the parent company Musk merged Twitter with earlier this year, but that it “works closely with X (Twitter), Tesla and other companies.”