san francisco Twitter CEO Elon Musk presented his company xAI for the first time on Wednesday. The aim of xAI is to “understand reality,” Musk wrote in a cryptic tweet on his short message service Twitter. The billionaire also co-founded the AI start-up OpenAI in 2015, but then broke with Sam Altman’s team and announced his own company.
A newly launched xAI website described the company’s purpose as: “xAI’s goal is to understand the true nature of the universe.”
In a tweet, Greg Yang, one of xAI’s co-founders, stated that the company will work to “develop the ‘theory of everything’ for large neural networks” to take AI to the next level. Yang said the AI will also allow everyone to better understand the mathematical universe.
Musk is the head of the company. According to the website, the team consists of engineers who have worked at companies such as Google, Microsoft and the ChatGPT provider OpenAI. The team also includes well-known AI researchers such as former Deepmind researcher Igor Babushkin, Manuel Kroiss (DeepMind), Tony Wu (University of Toronto) and Christian Szegedy (Google Research).
The founding of xAI dates back to March, according to the company registry, when Musk and Jared Birchall, the operator of Musk’s family office, founded a company called “X.AI” in Nevada, according to Bloomberg. Matching the company name, the domain name of the company’s website is “x.ai”. On Thursday evening (local time), xAI is scheduled to hold an event on Twitter.
xAI is said to work closely with other Elon Musk companies, such as the X Corporation, which is behind Twitter, but also with the electric car manufacturer Tesla.
It was initially unclear where the xAI headquarters would be. On the website, however, the company already offered application opportunities for AI professionals for the Bay Area – the name for the area on the US West Coast around San Francisco.
Dispute between Musk and OpenAi
Officially, when Musk left OpenAI in 2018, it was to avoid a conflict of interest with Tesla, which also does a lot of work in this space. A dispute between Musk and OpenAI boss Altman was discussed in industry circles. Since then he has openly criticized OpenAI.
In an interview in April, Musk announced the launch of an AI called TruthGPT as an opponent to Google and OpenAI. He had accused OpenAI of being controlled by Microsoft. The Windows group had invested more than ten billion dollars in the start-up.
Despite his work in the field of AI, Musk has expressed major reservations about the technology. The billionaire was among a group of researchers and tech industry leaders who called in March for the training of powerful AI models to be halted.
The xAI website says the company is being advised by Dan Hendrycks, director of the Center for AI Safety — a group that has warned of what it says is existential dangers of rapid AI development. In the spring of this year, the group published a warning letter describing the dangers to humanity posed by overly powerful AI systems.
Musk gets another challenging job as head of xAI. The 52-year-old already manages five companies: Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter, Neuralink and Boring Co. When he bought the short message service Twitter, a number of Tesla investors complained that Musk had too little time for his electric car manufacturer.
Dan Ives, analyst at Wedbush Securities said that xAI will likely work with Tesla as part of the Tesla ecosystem. “We believe that AI will be integrated into the Tesla vehicle in the coming years, with FSD playing a central role. It will all be part of the Tesla ecosystem, with Austin playing a key role in AI development,” Ives wrote.
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