Elon Musk Unveils Much-Anticipated Artificial Intelligence Startup xAI
Key Takeaways
- This Wednesday, Elon Musk announced the debut of his much awaited AI startup, dubbed xAI, whose goal is “to understand reality”
- xAI is a separate entity from Musk’s other businesses, but will work closely with them, according to the startup’s new website
- According to the website, Musk, along with the xAI team will reveal more details in a Twitter Spaces chat this Friday
On Wednesday, billionaire Elon Musk announced that his long-teased artificial intelligence startup, xAI, has officially been formed. Along with the announcement, Musk ambiguously tweeted that xAI’s driving goal would be “to understand reality.”
While it’s unclear what exactly this will entail, the company’s team consists of some of the industry’s top AI researchers who have previously worked for Google, DeepMind, OpenAI, Microsoft, and Tesla.
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How did xAI come about?
Earlier this year in May, Elon Musk was one of the signatories for an open letter from the Center for AI Safety, a San Francisco-based nonprofit, that emphatically warned about the existential risks to humanity of letting large AI models continue building, and instead called for a pause to reassess.
Since then, Musk seems to have accepted that pressing pause on AI development wasn’t a realistic or likely outcome — so instead, he formed xAI with the intention of building a “pro-humanity” AI model, and to “build [sic] an AI… in a good way, sort of hopefully.”
The startup’s founder does seem to be keeping in line with this motivating force, having enlisted the current director of the Center for AI Safety, Dan Hendrycks, to serve as advisor to the xAI team.
What do we know about xAI’s roadmap?
At this stage, things remain a little mysterious when it comes to the exact types of research that xAI will sink its teeth into. However, Musk has emphasized his plan for building a safer AI — and one that will be “maximally curious,” without having morality or other subjective views programmed into it.
Greg Yang, co-founder of xAI, has said that xAI will explore the “mathematics of deep learning,” and develop a “‘theory of everything for large neural networks’” — a key step, he says, toward taking AI to the next level.
According to xAI’s website, the startup plans to host a Twitter Spaces this Friday to share more details about the project’s scope, along with an opportunity for participants to ask any questions they may have — this session should shine some light on the kind of research xAI have their sights set on.
The bottom line
Generative AI has been a hot topic since OpenAI unveiled ChatGPT last November, which has, for the most part, dominated the market’s attention in the space. xAI may look to challenge ChatGPT’s dominance in due course, albeit with a slightly different approach which we’ll no doubt learn more about on Friday’s Twitter Spaces event.
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