Elon Musk launches new AI company to ‘understand the true nature of the universe’

For months, Elon Musk has been leaving a trail of breadcrumbs pointing toward a bigger AI project on the horizon and today that project was formally announced. 

xAI is a new company, led by Musk, that seeks to “understand the true nature of the universe,” according to the release posted on the company’s website.

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The release shared the names of a dozen xAI team members, including former employees of DeepMind, OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research, Tesla, and the University of Toronto. The list also includes engineers Igor Babuschkin and Manuel Kroiss, who Musk hired in early March. 

xAI is a separate company from X Corp, the company Twitter merged into in April. However, the release notes that the new AI company will work closely with Twitter and Tesla, among other companies, “to make progress towards our mission.” 

Today’s announcement follows a series of moves that suggested a major AI project in the making, including state filings in April which revealed that Musk had created a new AI company. 

In April, Musk also shared his intention to create a new AI model called TruthGPT. In an interview with Tucker Carlson, Musk described the new model as a “maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe,” wording that mirrored the press release’s description of xAI. 

Musk also purchased 10,000 GPUs for Twitter, which are crucial for machine-learning models and, again, demonstrated the existence of a project like xAI. 

Despite all of Musk’s work toward building this company, the announcement came at an interesting time as Musk signed a petition to halt further AI developments at the end of March and has spoken openly about the dangers of AI. 

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This isn’t Musk’s first AI endeavor; he was an investor in OpenAI when it was founded in 2015. Now xAI is positioning itself to compete directly with OpenAI as well as other giants in the industry. 

According to the xAI site, Musk and the team will answer questions about the new company via a Twitter Spaces chat on Friday, July 14.