Elon Musk kickstarts new AI company to ‘understand the universe’

American business magnate Elon Musk has launched a novel company dubbed “xAI” with the goal of understanding “the true nature of the universe.”

According to the July 12 announcement, xAI will work closely with Twitter, Tesla and other companies owned by Musk to “make progress toward our mission.” The firm said it is actively recruiting experienced engineers and researchers in the San Francisco Bay area to join its technical staff. The company also lists Dan Hendrycks, director of the Center for AI Safety, as its adviser. Developers wrote:

“We have previously worked at DeepMind, OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research, Tesla, and the University of Toronto. Collectively we contributed some of the most widely used methods in the field, in particular the Adam optimizer, Batch Normalization, Layer Normalization, and the discovery of adversarial examples.”

The xAI team also worked on past breakthroughs such as AlphaStar, AlphaCode, Inception, Minerva, GPT-3.5 and GPT-4. An upcoming Twitter Space chat for the venture is scheduled for July 14.

Cointelegraph reported on April 17 that Musk is developing a ChatGPT rival dubbed “TruthGPT,” a large language model that the business magnate says will be trained to explore the “mysteries of the universe.” According to Musk, TruthGPT is also designed to push back against “left-wing” bias in the industry, alleging that ChatGPT “is programmed by left-wing experts, which train the chatbots to lie.”

On July 6, Musk called for more regulatory oversight of artificial intelligence (AI), claiming the technology may be “smarter than all humans at everything” in the future. He also said that AI-powered devices, such as autonomous cars and robots, will bring “very profound change” to the world.