Elon Musk, the billionaire entrepreneur, on Wednesday launched his long-teased artificial intelligence (AI) start-up xAI, unveiling a team comprised of engineers from the same big US technology firms that he hopes to challenge in his bid to build an alternative to ChatGPT.
The start-up is to be led by Musk, already chief executive of electric automaker Tesla, chief executive of rocket launch company SpaceX and owner of Twitter, who has said on several occasions that the development of AI should be paused and that the sector needs regulation.
Musk has repeatedly voiced concerns about AI’s potential for “civilizational destruction.”
Photo: Reuters
In a Twitter Spaces event on Wednesday evening, Musk explained his plan for building a safer AI. Rather than explicitly programming morality into its AI, xAI is seeking to create a “maximally curious” AI, he said.
“If it tried to understand the true nature of the universe, that’s actually the best thing that I can come up with from an AI safety standpoint,” Musk said. “I think it is going to be pro-humanity from the standpoint that humanity is just much more interesting than not-humanity.”
Musk also predicted that superintelligence, or AI that is smarter than humans, would arrive in five or six years.
Musk cofounded OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, in 2015, but stepped down from the company’s board in 2018. Microsoft Corp is an investor in OpenAI.
The Web site for xAI said it would hold a Twitter Spaces event today.
The team at xAI includes Igor Babuschkin, a former engineer at Google’s DeepMind; Tony Wu, who worked at Google; Christian Szegedy, who was also a research scientist at Google; and Greg Yang, who was previously at Microsoft.
Musk in March registered a firm named X.AI Corp, incorporated in Nevada, according to a state filing. The firm lists Musk as the sole director and Jared Birchall, the managing director of Musk’s family office, as a secretary.
Musk in April said that he would launch TruthGPT, or a maximum truth-seeking AI to rival Google’s Bard and Microsoft’s Bing AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe.
Generative AI caught the limelight with OpenAI’s launch of popular chatbot ChatGPT, which came in November last year, ahead of the launch of Bard and Bing AI.
Dan Hendrycks, who is to advise the xAI team, is currently director of the Center for AI Safety and his work revolves around the risks of AI.
Musk’s new company is separate from X Corp, but is to work closely with Twitter, Tesla and other companies, according to the Web site.
The start-up said it is recruiting experienced engineers and researchers in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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