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.
