Twitter owner and tech entrepreneur Elon Musk announced the launch of his artificial intelligence company xAI.
“The goal of xAI is to understand the true nature of the universe,” reads the website.
The company will host a Twitter Spaces on Friday allowing users to meet and chat with the xAI team, though no specific time is listed.
The group is led by Musk and includes other names that have worked with AI from companies including OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research, and DeepMind, per the Verge.
Announcing formation of @xAI to understand reality
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 12, 2023
The xAI’s team is advised by Dan Hendrycks, who is the director of the Center for AI Safety, and consists of Igor Babuschkin, Manuel Kroiss, Yuhuai (Tony) Wu, Christian Szegedy, Jimmy Ba, Toby Pohlen, Ross Nordeen, Kyle Kosic, Greg Yang, Guodong Zhang, and Zihang Dai.
The xAI group is separate from Musk’s X Corp, which now encompasses Twitter, though will work closely with the social media platform along with Musk’s Tesla and other companies.
In an April Fox News segment, Musk discussed creating his own AI company to rival OpenAI, then called TruthGPT, though revealed it had been trained to be “politically correct” and provide false information
“I really put a lot of effort into creating this organization to serve as a counterweight to Google,” Musk told then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson. “I kind of took my eye off the ball … they are now closed-sourced.”
“They are obviously for-profit, and they’re closely-allied with Microsoft,” he said. “In effect, Microsoft has a very strong say, if not directly controls OpenAI at this point.”
BREAKING: @ElonMusk discusses creating an alternative to OpenAI, TruthGPT, because it is being trained to be politically correct and to lie to people. pic.twitter.com/HTFnve9o6d
— ALX 🇺🇸 (@alx) April 18, 2023
“I think I’ll create a third option,” Musk told Carlson. “We’ll see. It’s definitely starting late, but I will try to create a third option, and that third option hopefully does more good than harm.”
Musk noted the intention of OpenAI was to be a net positive, though said it was unclear if the company was “doing good” adding he was worried it’s politically correct training.
“There’s certainly a path to AI dystopia … to train AI to be deceptive,” Musk continued. “I’m gonna start something which you could call “TruthGPT,” or a maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe.”
Musk said an AI that cares about understanding the universe was the best path to safety.
“It’s unlikely to annihilate humans because we are an interesting part of the universe,” he said.
