Shrutika Patil, Pune
The billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk launched his much-anticipated artificial intelligence startup named xAI on Wednesday in an effort to displace ChatGPT, a chatbot developed by his former company OpenAI.
Mr Musk, who is already the CEO of electric car manufacturer Tesla, rocket launch business SpaceX, and owner of Twitter, will serve as the startup’s CEO. According to a state document, Mr. Musk filed a company called X.AI Corp, which was incorporated in Nevada, in March.
The company designates Mr. Musk as its only director and Jared Birchall, the family office’s managing director, as its secretary. Igor Babuschkin, a former engineer at Google’s DeepMind, Tony Wu, Christian Szegedy, a former research scientist at Google, and Greg Yang, a former employee of Microsoft, make up the xAI team.
Additionally, he has frequently expressed worries about the possible “civilisational destruction” that AI may cause, arguing that its advancement should be halted and that the sector needs oversight. On Wednesday evening, Musk presented his strategy for creating a more secure AI during a Twitter Spaces event. xAI will aim to develop a “maximally curious” AI rather than overtly coding morality into its AI, he said.
From an AI safety perspective, “if it tried to understand the true nature of the universe,” Musk added, “that’s actually the best thing I can come up with.” To compete with Google’s Bard and Microsoft’s Bing AI, Mr. Musk had announced in April that he would release TruthGPT, a “maximum truth-seeking AI” that seeks to grasp the nature of the world.
The xAI team will receive advice from Dan Hendrycks, who serves as director of the Centre for AI Safety and focuses on the dangers of AI. According to the website, Mr. Musk’s new business is independent of X Corp but will collaborate closely with Twitter, Tesla, and other organisations. In 2015, Mr. Musk helped found OpenAI, the organisation that created ChatGPT. However, he left the board of directors in 2018.