Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, has announced the launch of his new firm, xAI. “The goal of xAI is to understand the true nature of the universe,” the company’s website says. We are a separate company from X Corp, but will work closely with X (Twitter), Tesla, and other companies to make progress towards our mission,” the company’s website further says.
The website also names Igor Babuschkin, Manuel Kroiss, Yuhuai (Tony) Wu, Christian Szegedy, Jimmy Ba, Toby Pohlen, Ross Nordeen, Kyle Kosic, Greg Yang, Guodong Zhang, and Zihang Dai in addition to Musk.
The xAI team is being guided by Dan Hendrycks, a researcher who currently leads the Center for AI Safety, a charity that seeks to “reduce societal-scale risks associated with AI.”
The xAI team will conduct a Twitter Spaces discussion on July 14th
The @xAI team will conduct a Twitter Spaces discussion on July 14th, when listeners will be able to “meet the team and ask us questions,” according to the website. There was no set time. According to xAI’s website, the business is “separate” from Musk’s overarching X Corp, “but will work closely with X (Twitter), Tesla, and other companies.” Musk recently imposed harsh but presumably temporary restrictions on using Twitter, blaming the shift on scraping by AI businesses looking for data for large language models (LLMs).
xAI initially came to our attention in April, when documents revealed that Musk created the business in Nevada. Musk was named as its director at the time, with Jared Birchall, the director of Musk’s family office, acting as its secretary. At the time, nothing was known about xAI, but sources stated that Musk wanted funds from SpaceX and Tesla to get it started.
Musk has already worked with a prominent AI organization, co-founding OpenAI in 2015. However, he stepped away from it in 2018 to prevent a conflict of interest with Tesla, which also works in the subject extensively. He has recently openly denounced OpenAI and revealed to Tucker Carlson that he is working on something called “TruthGPT.”