Despite being one of the early critics of artificial intelligence (AI), billionaire Elon Musk has founded a new company specializing in the field. The official company registry document from the state of Nevada reveals that Musk established X.AI in March.
According to a recent Financial Times article, X.AI aims to compete with OpenAI, the California-based start-up behind ChatGPT, a generative AI program capable of interacting with humans and producing a variety of text upon request. Since its release in late November, the success of ChatGPT has sparked a race to develop this high-potential technology.
X.AI to rival OpenAI with former DeepMind employees and 10,000 GPUs
The official registration document for X.AI, dated March 9, 2023, lists Elon Musk as the sole director and Jared Birchall, a former Morgan Stanley banker who manages the billionaire’s fortune, as secretary, according to the FT. Anonymous sources also revealed that Musk recently recruited Igor Babuschkin and Manuel Kroiss, both of whom previously worked for DeepMind, Alphabet’s (Google’s parent company) AI branch. Musk reportedly purchased around 10,000 graphics processing units (GPUs), which are necessary for training language models and the foundation of generative AI systems.
Elon Musk launches X.AI despite signing a call to pause generative AI development
Despite calling for a pause in the development of generative AI just last month, the entrepreneur has launched his own AI company. The call to pause came from hundreds of signatories, including Musk, who expressed concerns over the various risks associated with the technology. They questioned whether it is desirable to develop non-human minds that could ultimately outnumber and outsmart us.
Elon Musk played a significant role as a co-founder of OpenAI in 2015, but he departed from the company in 2018. Since then, he has criticized the firm, stating in a December tweet that it is training AI to be “woke,” a term describing a segment of the American left, which he interprets as “lying.”