Elon Musk Urges for ‘Secure’ Artificial Intelligence at xAI Startup

During a Twitter Spaces discussion on Friday, Elon Musk stated that his new startup is undoubtedly vying with OpenAI. Musk’s latest venture, xAI, is his response to OpenAI, which is presently the most talked-about and well-financed participant in the rapidly expanding artificial intelligence sector.

During the conversation, Musk and employees of his new startup spoke highly of xAI’s mission. While the startup doesn’t have any products yet, it unveiled a new website this week with the goal of safely developing artificial intelligence, or AGI.

The plan is to “build a good AGI whose main purpose is just to try to understand the universe,” Musk said. He later added, “I think you could reframe xAI’s mission as, ‘What the hell is really going on?’ That’s our goal.”

The concept of AGI, technology that can understand or learn tasks that humans can, has delighted and horrified scientists — even though it’s still only theoretical. On Friday, Musk’s new employees were enthusiastic about the technology. Greg Yang, a former Microsoft Corp. engineer, compared the current state of artificial intelligence to the invention of quantum physics and general relativity.

At times during the conversation, some of Musk’s statements bordered on the outlandish. “Why isn’t there massive evidence of aliens?” he asked at one point.

Musk has had a notoriously hot and cold relationship with artificial intelligence. In 2015, he co-founded OpenAI, then a few years later resigned from its board and has been critical of the company. In March, the billionaire added his name to a request to take a six-month hiatus from AI development — then less than six months later, he officially launched xAI.

XAI’s 12 early employees, including Musk, are all men and all have industry backgrounds. Most previously worked at Alphabet Inc.’s Google and DeepMind in some capacity.

One area of concern has been the relative concentration of AI research. One xAI employee — Kyle Kosic, formerly of OpenAI — said he expects more competition in the field. “The reason I’m particularly excited about xAI is that I think the biggest danger in AI is monopolization by a few entities,” Kosic said.