Elon Musk launches xAI in challenge to dominance of ChatGPT owner

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Elon Musk has formally launched xAI, an artificial intelligence company aiming to challenge the dominance of Sam Altman’s OpenAI and “understand the true nature of the universe”.

The company will be led by Musk and staffed by a team hired from other leading AI research labs, including Igor Babuschkin from DeepMind and researchers from Microsoft and OpenAI.

The Twitter owner and Tesla and SpaceX boss has also secured thousands of GPU processors from Nvidia, which are required to build large language models that consume vast amounts of content.

The Financial Times first reported Musk’s plans for an AI company in April as he sought to catch up with OpenAI, which has driven growing interest in the sector since the launch of its ChatGPT chatbot in November.

Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015, but left in 2018 after clashes with management around their approach to AI safety, according to people who were at the company at the time.

In the past year, with Musk focused on generating a return from his $44bn purchase of Twitter, OpenAI, Google and generative AI companies including Anthropic, Adept and StabilityAI have launched a series of increasingly sophisticated models.

Those advances have helped propel the valuation of sector star OpenAI into the tens of billions and placed AI models, which have for years been the preserve of researchers, into the hands of consumers.

It is not clear how or whether Musk will seek to commercialise his own AI research efforts. The company’s website carries scant details beyond that it has a dozen strong, all-male founding team. On Twitter, Musk wrote that xAI was being formed to “understand reality”, giving no further details.

Earlier this year Musk was the most prominent signatory of an open letter calling for OpenAI and other companies leading AI research to “immediately pause for at least six months”.

Training anything more powerful than the ChatGPT4 chatbot released by Altman’s company in March could exacerbate the already “profound risks to society and humanity” posed by AI, the letter said.

xAI will be advised by Dan Hendrycks, director of the Center for AI Safety, which aims to “reduce societal-scale risks associated with AI”. 

But many in the AI community have expressed scepticism about the timing of Musk’s intervention. Two weeks before the open letter’s publication, Musk and Jared Birchall, the ex-Morgan Stanley banker who manages his wealth, incorporated a company called X.AI in Nevada, according to business records.

xAI will be separate from the rest of Musk’s empire, but will work closely with Twitter and Tesla, according to its website.