Elon Musk launches xAI to take on ChatGPT-maker OpenAI

Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, has launched a new generative AI venture, dubbed xAI, to take on the likes of OpenAI — the maker of ChatGPT.

“The goal of xAI is to understand the true nature of the universe,” the company said on its official website.

Musk, who was a board member of OpenAI at the time of its inception in 2015, has also roped in Center for AI Safety’s director Dan Hendrycks to be a part of xAI’s advisory team.

In May, the members of the Center for AI Safety signed an open letter warning that AI evolution could lead to an extinction event and suggested that controlling the technology should be a top global priority.

However, Musk, who has been a vocal critic of ChatGPT and the general direction that other companies are taking on generative AI, said xAI will not look to explicitly program morality into its AI engine but rather try to make it understand the true nature of the universe in order to make it safer, Reuters reported.

xAI, which is headquartered in the San Francisco Bay area, has so far hired 11 AI engineers who have contributed to notable innovations while working at companies such as DeepMind, OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research, Tesla, and the University of Toronto.

These engineers include the likes of ex-DeepMind staffer Igor Babuschkin, former Microsoft staffer Greg Yang, and former Google staffers Tony Wu and Christian Szegedy.

These individuals, according to the newly formed company, have led breakthroughs and development of technology such as the AlphaStar gaming program, Google’s Minerva AI, OpenAI’s GPT-3.5, and GPT-4 large language models.

The company is also looking to hire experienced engineers and researchers to expand its technical team.

Incorporated in March, xAI is a new legal entity, different from Twitter, which has been renamed X Corp, Musk clarified.

However, Tesla and Twitter will work closely with xAI to design the new generative AI engine, the company said.