July 12 (Portal) – Elon Musk, the billionaire entrepreneur, on Wednesday launched his long-heralded artificial intelligence startup xAI, unveiling a team made up of engineers from the same major US tech companies he has helped in his attempt to build a Want to develop an alternative to ChatGPT.
The startup is led by Musk, who is already CEO of electric carmaker Tesla (TSLA.O), CEO of rocket launch company SpaceX, and owner of Twitter, and has said on numerous occasions that AI development should be halted and that the sector needed regulation. Musk has repeatedly raised concerns about AI’s potential for “civilizational destruction.”
In a Twitter Spaces event Wednesday night, Musk outlined his plan to build safer AI. Instead of explicitly programming morality into its AI, xAI will try to create a “maximally curious” AI, he said.
“If it’s trying to understand the true nature of the universe, that’s actually the best I can come up with from an AI security perspective,” Musk said. “I think it’s going to be pro-humanist because humanity is just so much more interesting than non-humanity.”
Musk also predicted that superintelligence, meaning an AI that is smarter than humans, will be here in five or six years.
Musk co-founded OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, in 2015, but resigned from the company’s board of directors in 2018.
Microsoft is an investor in OpenAI.
xAI’s website announced that a Twitter Spaces event will be held on July 14th.
The xAI team includes Igor Babushkin, a former engineer at Google’s DeepMind; Tony Wu, who at Google
Musk registered a Nevada-based company called X.AI Corp in March, according to a state filing. The company lists Musk as sole director and Jared Birchall, the managing director of Musk’s family office, as secretary.
Musk announced in April that he would launch TruthGPT, a maximum truth-seeking AI designed to compete with Google’s Bard and Microsoft’s (MSFT.O) Bing AI in an attempt to understand the nature of the universe.
Generative AI came into the limelight with OpenAI’s launch of the popular chatbot ChatGPT in November last year, ahead of the launch of Bard and Bing AI.
Dan Hendrycks, who will advise the xAI team, is currently the director of the Center for AI Safety and his work revolves around the risks of AI.
According to the site, Musk’s new company is separate from X Corp but will work closely with Twitter, Tesla and other companies.
xAI said it recruits experienced engineers and researchers in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Reporting by Akash Sriram, Chavi Mehta, Yuvraj Malik and Aditya Soni in Bengaluru, Anna Tong in San Francisco; Adaptation by Shailesh Kuber and Leslie Adler
Our standards: The Trust Principles.