xAI, Elon Musk’s AI startup, will unveil its technologies on Saturday, he announced on Friday.
“On X, the former Twitter, tomorrow, xAI will release its first AI to a select group,” Musk wrote. “It is the best that is currently available in some significant respects.”
According to its website, the AI venture, which Elon Musk unveiled in July, aims to “understand the true nature of the universe.” Musk appears to be positioning it to compete with firms like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, which are responsible for popular chatbots like ChatGPT, Bard, and Claude. Musk is said to have obtained thousands of powerful GPU processors from Nvidia in the spring, the kind of CPUs required to construct a sizable language model similar to programs like Google’s Bard or OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
According to LinkedIn profiles examined by CNBC, the team behind xAI consists of former employees of DeepMind, OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research, Twitter, and Tesla. These individuals have worked on projects such as DeepMind’s AlphaCode and OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 chatbots.
In an April filmed interview on Fox News Channel, Musk revealed the specifics of his intentions for a new artificial intelligence tool dubbed “TruthGPT.” He also expressed his concern that current AI businesses are giving priority to systems that are “politically correct.”
In order to take artificial intelligence (AI) “to the next level,” Greg Yang, co-founder of xAI, says the company will investigate the “mathematics of deep learning,” a branch of AI, and “develop the ‘theory of everything’ for large neural networks.”
Several xAI employees appeared to be hiring in August based on posts they made on social media. In the same month, Toby Pohlen, one of the founders of xAI, shared a blue-and-white logo image on the platform with the caption, “Getting everything ready for the first alpha testers.”
Per papers, Musk established xAI in Nevada in March. On the xAI website, the company announces its separation from X Corp. and states that it will “work closely with X (Twitter), Tesla, and other companies to make progress towards our mission.” Prior to this, he had renamed Twitter to “X Corp.” in certain financial filings.
Dan Hendrycks, executive director of the Center for AI Safety, a nonprofit organization based in San Francisco, is identified as the startup’s advisor. In a letter published in May, tech leaders signed the letter and stated that “mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”
Many in the tech industry, especially academics and ethicists, reacted negatively to the letter because they felt that it was overly focused on the potential dangers of AI in the vague future, rather than the harm that algorithms are already doing to oppressed people in the actual world.