Elon Musk announced the creation of the company xAI, which will carry out activities in the area of artificial intelligence.
The owner of Twitter, speaking about the purpose of the existence of the new firm, outlined a very ambitious aspiration, which is to understand the nature of the Universe with the help of the digital mind. It is extremely difficult to predict whether the company will be able to unravel the mysteries of the universe using machine intelligence, but it is obvious that this intention in terms of scale significantly exceeds the goal setting of other AI developers.
Elon Musk will personally lead the Xai team. Among the specialists of the new firm will be former employees of DeepMind from Google, Microsoft, and Tesla, who were previously engaged in the development of artificial intelligence.
Elon Musk took part in the creation of OpenAI, a startup that has developed the most popular chatbot based on generative AI called ChatGPT. At the same time, the entrepreneur has repeatedly criticized this company. In his opinion, the startup is in the zone of excessive control by Microsoft. This technology giant has invested about $13 billion in the company. Elon Musk left the board of directors of OpenAI in 2018.
The owner of Twitter has an ambiguous position about artificial intelligence. On the one hand, he is a direct participant in the AI development process, but at the same time expresses doubts about the advanced technology. The billionaire supported the initiative of a group of researchers and leaders of the technology sector, who in March called for a temporary halt to the training of large artificial intelligence models.
Elon Musk’s new company has also attracted two scientists from the University of Toronto, Guodong Zhang, and Jimmy Ba. Ba together with Diederik Kingma in 2014 wrote an article on optimization in deep learning, which is one of the most cited informational materials on the topic of artificial intelligence.
Elon Musk is not someone who admires San Francisco, but a message was posted on the xAI website that the company is actively hiring experienced engineers and researchers to work in the Bay area. Until now, artificial intelligence developers have been based primarily in Silicon Valley.
In the spring, the media reported that Elon Musk is negotiating with investors of his other companies, Tesla and Space Exploration Technologies, about financing a startup focused on developments in the field of digital intelligence. Insiders also said that the billionaire had purchased thousands of processors from Nvidia for a new company.
The xAI website contains information that the firm is advised by Dan Hendrycks, who is the director of the Artificial Intelligence Security Center, who warned that the dangers associated with the rapid development of advanced technology are existential.
Elon Musk currently oversees six companies, including Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter, Neuralink, Boring, and now xAI. A billionaire often employs specialists from one of these firms to work on projects of his other company. Such decisions are logical, since a kind of technological empire of Elon Musk is a construction, the elements of which are interconnected to a certain extent.
As we have reported earlier, Elon Musk Says to Make AI Safe Requires New Model and Regulations.
