Elon Musk creates AI firm xAI

Elon Musk has finally launched his long-teased artificial intelligence start-up xAI, unveiling a team comprised of engineers from the same big US technology firms that he hopes to challenge in his bid to build an alternative to ChatGPT.

The company will be led by Elon Musk who has said on a number of occasions that the development of AI should be paused and that the sector needed regulation. He has repeatedly voiced concerns about AI’s potential for “civilisational destruction”.

Musk recently explained his plan for building a safer AI. Rather than explicitly programming morality into its AI, xAI will seek to create a “maximally curious” AI. He said if it tried to understand the true nature of the universe, that’s actually the best thing that he could come up with from an AI safety standpoint. “I think it is going to be pro-humanity from the standpoint that humanity is just much more interesting than not-humanity.” – he added.

Musk has also predicted that super-intelligence, or AI that is smarter than humans, will arrive in five or six years.

Elon Musk is the co-founder for OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, in 2015, but stepped down from the company’s board in 2018. Microsoft is an investor in OpenAI.

The website for xAI is set to hold a Twitter Spaces event on 14 July.

The team at xAI includes Igor Babuschkin, a former engineer at Google’s DeepMind; Tony Wu, who worked at Google; Christian Szegedy, who was also a research scientist at Google; and Greg Yang, who was previously at Microsoft.