Elon Musk, the billionaire founder of Tesla, SpaceX and Twitter, revealed his latest venture on Wednesday: xAI, an artificial intelligence startup that aims to create a “maximally curious” AI that tries to understand the true nature of the universe.
Musk, who has been a vocal critic of AI’s potential dangers and the need for regulation, said in a Twitter Spaces event that he hopes xAI will build a safer AI that is pro-humanity and more interesting than not-humanity. He also estimated that superintelligence, or AI that surpasses human intelligence, will emerge in five or six years.
Musk’s new company is separate from X Corp, but will collaborate with Twitter, Tesla and other companies, according to its website. The website also said it will hold another Twitter Spaces event on July 14.
The team at xAI includes engineers and researchers who have worked at Google, Google’s DeepMind, Microsoft and other big U.S. tech firms that Musk wants to challenge with his alternative to ChatGPT, the popular chatbot developed by OpenAI.
Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015, but left its board in 2018. Microsoft is an investor in OpenAI. Musk had announced in April that he would launch TruthGPT, a maximum truth-seeking AI to rival Google’s Bard and Microsoft’s Bing AI.
xAI is led by Musk and advised by Dan Hendrycks, the director of the Center for AI Safety and an expert on AI risks. The company is registered in Nevada and lists Musk as the sole director and Jared Birchall, the managing director of Musk’s family office, as a secretary.
xAI said it is hiring experienced engineers and researchers in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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