Elon Musk announced the start of a new artificial intelligence firm, xAI, to understand the true nature of the universe. As per the firm’s website, more details will be added soon.
Team members behind xAI were previously part of DeepMind, Google Research, OpenAI, Microsoft Research, Tesla, and Twitter. They have worked on projects like DeepMind’s AlphaCode as well as OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 chatbots.
Elon Musk wants to position xAI to compete with firms such as Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI which are behind leading chatbots like Claude, Bard, and ChatGPT respectively.
In April, Musk secured GPU processors from Nvidia to power a potential large language model. Musk revealed details of his plans for coming up with a new AI tool ‘TruthGPT’ in the same month.
A few days ago, a letter was signed by many tech leaders stating, “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks, such as pandemics and nuclear war.”
The letter received a negative response from many academics and ethicists of the belief, “Too much attention on AI’s increasing power and its future risks distracts from real-life harms that some algorithms cause marginalized sections currently, 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.”
