Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, and owner of Twitter, formed xAI, an Artificial Intelligence (AI) corporation which appears to be a rival to OpenAI and its ChatGPT. As indicated on a state business filing, the company was founded on March 9 and is based in Nevada, U.S. Although xAI is a separate company, it will work closely with other companies such as X (Twitter) and Tesla.
The intention to launch a rival chatbot called TruthGPT was announced by Musk in an interview in April. As announced by Musk, the new AI company will serve as a “maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe.” For an AI project at Twitter, Musk bought thousands of powerful computing processors and hired engineering staff, according to Insider. Other technology giants such as Google, Meta, and Microsoft have already worked on AI for years, mainly to assist with translations, as well as targeted advertising, but it was previously known as machine learning or big data.
According to the company’s website, the team led by Elon Musk includes experts that have previously worked at DeepMind, OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research, Tesla, and the University of Toronto, while the team is advised by Dan Hendrycks, the director of the Center for AI Safety.
xAI was founded before Musk joined experts who signed an open letter that urges a six-month pause in powerful AI development. Musk also publicly criticized AI development and called for regulations. Signatories included academics and technology companies, like Apple’s co-founder Steve Wozniak. It was written that “AI systems with human-competitive intelligence can pose profound risks to society and humanity.”
Previously, Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015, but left the company in 2018, in order to avoid a conflict of interest with his work at Tesla.
