XAI: Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk on Wednesday launched his long-talked-about artificial intelligence startup XAI, unveiling a team of engineers from the same big US technology companies he hopes to challenge in his bid to create an alternative to ChatGPT.
The startup will be headed by Musk, already CEO of electric car maker Tesla, CEO of rocket launch company SpaceX and owner of Twitter, who has said on several occasions that AI development should be curtailed and that the sector needs regulation. Musk has repeatedly expressed concern about AI’s potential for “the destruction of civilization”.
In a Twitter space event on Wednesday evening, Musk laid out his plan to build secure AI. Instead of explicitly programming morality into its AI, XAI will seek to create a “maximally curious” AI, he said.
“If it tries to understand the true nature of the universe, it’s really the best thing to do from an AI security perspective,” Musk said. “I think it would be pro-humanity from the point of view that humanity is far more interesting than no-humanity.”
Musk also predicted that superintelligence, or AI that is smarter than humans, would arrive in five or six years. Musk co-founded OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, in 2015, but resigned from the company’s board in 2018.
- XAI’s website said that it will hold a Twitter Space event on July 14.
- XAI’s team includes former Google DeepMind engineer Igor Babushkin; Tony Wu, who worked at Google; Christian Szegedi, who was also a research scientist at Google; and Greg Yang, formerly of Microsoft.
- According to state filings, Musk registered a firm named X.AI Corp, incorporated in Nevada, in March. The firm lists Musk as sole director and Jared Birchall, managing director of Musk’s family office, as secretary.
- Musk said in April that he would launch TruthGPT, or Maximum Truth-Searching AI, that seeks to understand the nature of the universe, to compete with Google’s Bard and Microsoft’s Bing AI.
