Tesla CEO, Elon Musk has announced the launching of his own artificial intelligence company, xAI, as he seeks to compete with OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT — a program he had earlier accused of being politically biased and irresponsible.
The xAI website said on Wednesday the Tesla tycoon would run the company separately from his other companies but that the technology developed would benefit those businesses, including Twitter.
‘The goal of xAI is to understand the true nature of the universe,’ the website said.
Musk said on Twitter added that the new company’s aim was to “understand reality” and answer life’s biggest questions.
The startup is staffed by former researchers from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Tesla and the University of Toronto.
The team is to be advised by Dan Hendrycks, who currently leads the Center for AI Safety, a San Francisco-based organisation that warns against developing AI too quickly.
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Additionally, Hendrycks was the driving force behind the open letter to world leaders in June that warned AI posed a threat to humanity on par with pandemics and nuclear conflict.
Musk has frequently expressed concern about the risks posed by AI, referring to it as ‘our biggest existential threat’ and claiming that going too quickly would be like ‘summoning the demon.’
He has asserted that he helped form OpenAI in 2015 because he thought Google’s hasty efforts to enhance artificial intelligence were irresponsible.
He left OpenAI in 2018 to concentrate on Tesla, subsequently admitting that he was uneasy with the business’s profit-driven course under CEO Sam Altman’s leadership.
Musk also argues that OpenAI’s large language models — on which ChatGPT depends on for content, as is the case with other AI programs — are overly politically correct.
Musk in April shared details of his plans for a new AI tool called ‘TruthGPT’ in an interview with Fox News, the conservative broadcaster.
In the interview, he said his new AI company would come very late after OpenAI and Google DeepMind, both of which have made great strides in recent years.
‘I think I will create a third option, although it’s starting very late in the game. Can it be done? I don’t know, we’ll see,’ he said.
The launch of an AI company on the scale of OpenAI or Google DeepMind would come at an enormous expense, especially in regard to the necessary semiconductors, known as GPUs, which are mainly built by California company Nvidia.