Elon Musk on Wednesday announced the formation of a new company focused on artificial intelligence, after months of teasing plans to build a rival to ChatGPT.
The company, called xAI, unveiled a website and a team of a dozen staffers. The new company will be led by Musk, according to the website, and “will work closely with X (Twitter), Tesla, and other companies to make progress towards our mission.”
“The goal of xAI is to understand the true nature of the universe,” the website states, echoing language Musk has used before to describe his AI ambitions.
Musk was an early backer of ChatGPT-creator OpenAI, but later criticized the company for inputting safeguards that aim to prevent the viral chatbot from spewing biased .
“The danger of training AI to be woke – in other words, lie – is deadly,” Musk tweeted in December, responding to a Twitter user who asked OpenAI’s CEO if it was possible to “turn off the woke settings” on ChatGPT.
In an interview with then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson in April, Musk said teased plans for his new AI venture. “We’re going to start something which I call TruthGPT,” he said, describing it as a “maximum truth-seeking AI” that “cares about understanding the universe.”
Musk’s announcement of the new company comes months after he warned in an interview that he thinks AI could cause “civilization destruction” and joined other tech leaders in calling for a pause in an “out of control” AI race.
Few other details on the company’s mission were immediately available, but the website indicates it is actively recruiting staff. At the moment, all of the dozen staffers on the website appear to be men.
The announcement of Musk’s latest venture comes at a precarious moment for Musk.
Twitter, the company he acquired for $44 billion in October, now faces an uncertain future after Meta launched a rival app called Threads. Meta’s app topped 100 million sign-ups in less than a week. Meanwhile, there were multiple reports of Twitter’s usage declining.
The turbulence at Twitter comes after months of Musk alienating some users and advertisers by slashing staff, pushing through controversial policy changes and making a number of incendiary remarks.
I think there should be a regulatory body established for overseeing AI to make sure that it does not present a danger to the public", he said.
Mr Musk has also pitted himself against AI companies due to the data they use to train chatbots - the software that learns how humans interacts by scraping masses of data from various sources to fuel its knowledge and interaction styles.
The billionaire believes vast amounts of Twitter's data is scraped from the platform, and that the company should be adequately compensated.
Mr Musk purchased the microblogging platform in a deal worth billions, before making sweeping changes which led to many leaving the platform in protest, including the producer of shows such as Grey's Anatomy and Bridgerton, Shonda Rhimes, as well as model Gigi Hadid and comedian and actor Stephen Fry.
In addition to Twitter, Musk runs several other companies, including Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink and The Boring Company.
You must be logged in to post a comment.