Elon Musk declares new AI startup with retired engineers of Google and OpenAI Engineers

July 13, 2023: On Wednesday, Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX and Twitter, announced the debut of a unique AI company known as xAI, to “understand the true nature of the universe.” According to the organization’s website, Musk, and his team will share more information in a live Twitter Spaces chat on Friday.

Team members behind xAI are alumni of DeepMind, OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research, Twitter, and Tesla and have worked on projects including DeepMind’s AlphaCode and OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 chatbots. Musk is positioning xAI to compete with companies like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic behind leading chatbots like ChatGPT, Bard, and Claude.

The Financial Times previously registered News of the startup in April, along with reports that Musk had secured thousands of GPU processors from Nvidia to power a potential large language model. That same month, Musk shared details of his plans for a new AI tool called “TruthGPT” during a taped interview on Fox News Channel, adding that he feared existing AI companies are prioritizing systems that are “politically correct.”

One of the AI startup’s advisors will be Dan Hendricks, executive director of the Center for AI Safety. This San Francisco-based nonprofit published a letter signed by tech leaders in May claiming that “mitigating the threat of extinction beginning from AI should be a global priority alongside different societal-scale risks like pandemics and nuclear war.”

The letter obtained pushback from many academics and ethicists of the belief that too much focus on AI’s growing power and its future threats distracts from real-life harms that some algorithms cause to marginalized residents right now rather than in an unspecified future.

According to Greg Yang, co-founder of xAI, the startup will delve into the “mathematics of deep learning,” a facet of AI, and “develop the ‘theory of everything’ for large neural networks” to take AI “to the next level.”

Musk reportedly included xAI in Nevada in March. Previously, he had changed the name of Twitter to “X Corp” in some financial filings. Still, on xAI’s website, the company notes its separation from X Corp, adding that it will “work closely with X (Twitter), Tesla, and other companies to make progress towards our mission.”