Musk has talked about xAI for months, and registered a new company with that name in Nevada in March. On Wednesday, he unveiled a team of 11 employees, drawn from OpenAI, Google and the University of Toronto, a center of academic AI research. The company is separate from Twitter and Musk’s other companies, SpaceX and Tesla, but would work closely with them, according to the site.
Tesla, which for years has been working on building self-driving cars, already has a robust AI team and a massive supply of number-crunching computers, something that is critical for training the complex “large-language models” that give chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT the ability to have conversations, write code and pass professional exams. And Twitter is a trove of data to help train any large-language model.
“The goal of xAI is to understand the true nature of the universe,” the website says.
Musk and Tesla spokespeople did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
It’s unclear how xAI and Tesla would cooperate, as Tesla is a public company with a broad base of investors. When Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion last year, he was criticized for pulling engineers from Tesla to help in the first weeks of his ownership of the company.
Musk has opined on AI for years and was an early proponent of the belief that humans should be careful in developing smarter computers, fearing that super-intelligent AI might one day get out from human control. He was a founding member of ChatGPT creator OpenAI, but left the company’s board in 2018 and has recently criticized its transformation from a nonprofit to a profit-seeking company. In an interview with CNBC in May, Musk said he was “the reason that OpenAI exists,” and that the company did not take concerns about AI safety seriously enough.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said Musk is a “jerk” but that he believes the billionaire cares about the future of AI and humanity.
Musk’s new AI team includes University of Toronto assistant professor Jimmy Ba, an AI researcher who trained under AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton, Toby Pohlen, a former researcher at Google’s DeepMind AI lab, and Christian Szegedy, who also did research for Google.
Dan Hendrycks, the director of the Center for AI Safety, which advocates for greater awareness around the risks of AI slipping out from human control, is advising the company. Hendrycks said he is only taking a $1 salary so he can “remain unbiased and not have incentive to limit my criticism.”
XAI represents yet another company Musk has responsibility for, adding to Twitter, SpaceX, Tesla and a handful of other, smaller ventures. Tesla investors have grumbled since Musk bought Twitter that he is stretching himself too thin and shirking his duty to his other companies.
Competition in AI is fierce now. Google, Microsoft and other Big Tech companies have for years poured billions of dollars into AI research, integrating their breakthroughs into existing products such as Google Search or to make their data centers more efficient. Last year, OpenAI kicked off a new wave of excitement around the tech by releasing ChatGPT directly to consumers, giving them the ability to see the advances in AI tech that have taken place.
That spurred Microsoft and Google to speed up their own efforts at building AI tools for people to directly use, and Microsoft signed a massive deal to use OpenAI’s tech, while Google has rushed out its own competing products. Start-ups such as Anthropic and Cohere are also building their own large-language models, relying on partnerships with Big Tech or massive venture capital funding to get the necessary computational power to train the AI on their own.
