Elon Musk launches xAI, rivaling OpenAI

Elon Musk launched his artificial intelligence startup, xAI on Wednesday, with a team of engineers from other US technology firms he hopes to challenge by building a ChatGPT alternative.

The startup will be led by Musk, who is the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, and the owner of Twitter, who had previously expressed his concerns about AI’s potential for civilizational destruction and called for regulations of the sector.

Musk explained his plan for building a safer AI in a Twitter Spaces event; rather than explicitly programming morality into xAI, the company will seek to create a maximally curious AI.

“If it tried to understand the true nature of the universe, that’s actually the best thing that I can come up with from an AI safety standpoint, I think it is going to be pro-humanity from the standpoint that humanity is just much more interesting than not-humanity,” said Musk.

Musk, who was a co-founder at OpenAI in 2015 but stepped down in 2018, predicts that superintelligence, a smarter-than-humans- AI, to arrive in five or six years.

The xAI team includes Igor Babuschkin, a former engineer at Google’s DeepMind, Tony Wu, who worked at Google, Christian Szegedy, who was a research scientist at Google, and Greg Yang, who previously worked at Microsoft.

Musk had registered a firm named X.AI Corp, which lists him as the sole director, and Jared Birchall, the managing director of Musk’s family office as a secretary.

Musk said in April that he would launch TruthGPT, a maximum truth-seeking AI, to rival Google’s Bard and Microsoft’s Bing AI, which tries to understand the nature of the universe.