Elon Musk's xAI is here: Know what it is
What's the story
The world has been aware of Elon Musk's xAI for a while. The billionaire formed the artificial intelligence (AI) company in March. However, we did not hear anything much about the new firm. At least, until now. xAI has finally made its public appearance with a website detailing its intent and purpose. Let's take a look at the company.
Context
Why does this story matter?
Musk's AI aspirations have been clear since the beginning of this year. He has been vocal about how the world should be cautious about AI and its abilities. The Tesla CEO was one of the co-founders of OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT. With xAI, Musk aims to challenge AI race leaders like OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google.
Understanding universe
xAI will understand the true nature of the universe
xAI's purpose, according to its website, is to understand the "true nature of the universe." This is in line with what Musk said when he talked about TruthGPT, an AI tool that could challenge ChatGPT or Bard. According to him, an AI that believes in understanding the true nature of the universe "is unlikely to annihilate humans."
Musk
Musk hopes Zuckerberg doesn't copy xAI
Musk took to Twitter to announce the company. "Announcing formation of xAI to understand reality," he wrote. He did not forget to take a dig at Mark Zuckerberg, saying, "Hopefully Zuck doesn't hit copy and paste here too." The billionaire, however, did not say anything more about his company. Per xAI's website, he will lead the firm.
Twitter Post
xAI will focus on understanding the reality
Announcing formation of @xAI to understand reality
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 12, 2023
The team
xAI has a team consisting leading AI researchers
In February this year, it was reported that Musk is building an AI superteam to challenge leading companies in AI. He even held talks with Igor Babuschkin, the man behind Google DeepMind's AlphaStar, about AI. xAI's team includes some of the leading names in the AI space, including Babuschkin, Toby Pohlen, another DeepMind alum, and former OpenAI technical staff Kyle Kosic.
Meet
xAI team is hosting a Twitter Spaces chat
Other members of the team include Manuel Kroiss, Yuhuai (Tony) Wu, Christian Szegedy, Jimmy Ba, Ross Nordeen, Greg Yang, Guodong Zhang, and Zihang Dai. Center of AI Safety's director Dan Hendrycks is xAI's advisor. The xAI team is hosting a Twitter Spaces chat on July 14. The time is yet to be announced. We should get a clearer idea about the company then.
Future
The firm will work with Twitter and Tesla
xAI's website says the company is not a part of X Corp, but will closely work with X (Twitter) and Tesla. The firm is bound to benefit from its relationship with Twitter and Tesla. The former is a multimodal data goldmine, while the latter has been involved in AI research for a long time. Tesla is also highly experienced in building huge training clusters.
Rate limits
Musk recently announced rate limits on Twitter
Musk recently announced rate limits on Twitter, limiting the amount of tweets a person can see per day. The measure was aimed at AI start-ups that scraped data from Twitter to train large language models (LLMs). Maybe Twitter introduced the change as a precursor to xAI. Musk probably doesn't want AI start-ups other than his own to use Twitter data. We'll find out soon.