The founder and CEO of Tesla, Elon Musk, presented this Wednesday xAI, a new artificial intelligence company whose objective, in his own words, will be to “understand the true nature of the universe.” The tycoon has been warning for years about the risk posed to humanity by the development of unsupervised artificial intelligence. He even went so far as to ask, together with other technological experts and entrepreneurs, that the advances of AI be suspended and regulated. But at the same time he was preparing his own program based on this technology. This week the official announcement has arrived:
The name of this new company is X Corp., which is explained in the context of Musk’s plan for Twitter: to turn it into a superapp under the X brand. The new employees of xAI -by the way, they are all men- will work together with the workers of the social network, those of Tesla and those of Space X to “advance towards their joint mission”, as detailed on the xAI website. Next Friday, July 14, a conference is scheduled in which those interested in this company will be able to find out more details.
Last April Musk announced the creation of a new artificial intelligence: TruthGPT. The objective of this, according to him, was to compete against the alternatives developed by Microsoft (ChatGPT) and Google (Bard). In addition, in an interview with Tucker Carlson, on Fox News he presented it as an AI that “seeks the ultimate truth and tries to understand the nature of the universe.”
It was then that it was learned that in March he had registered a company called X.AI Corp. in Nevada. “Definitely, I’m starting late. But I will try to create a third option and that third option I hope will do more good than harm,” Musk acknowledged at the time.
But how will it cope with giants like Google or Microsoft in this race? That’s where the link to Twitter comes in. xAI will use the social network to train its language model. The platform’s database is huge and has millions of expressions and their context; so you can expand your language skills.
On the company’s website, which was presented this Wednesday, it can be seen that Musk will lead the team and will include executives who have worked in a wide range of companies at the forefront of artificial intelligence, such as DeepMind, OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research, Tesla or the University of Toronto.
Together, the team that integrates xAI contributed with “some of the most used methods in the field, in particular, Adam’s optimizer, batch normalization, layer normalization and the discovery of contradictory examples”, details the website of the company.
“In addition, we introduced innovative techniques and analytics such as Transformer-X, Autoformalization, the Memory Transformer, batch size scaling, and ?Transfer. We have worked with and led the development of some of the biggest breakthroughs in the field, including AlphaStar, AlphaCode, Inception, Minerva, GPT-3.5 and GPT-4”, complements the web.
Dan Hendrycks, who currently serves as director of the Center for AI Security, is the advisor to the company with the most high-profile names. Former Google employees like Igor Babuschkin, Zizhang Dai, Tony Wu and Toby Pohlen, or two University of Toronto academics, Guodong Zhang and Jimmy Ba, an assistant professor who studied under AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton.
Ba is the name that shines the brightest among all. In 2014 he published together with Diederik Kingma, Adam, a paper on optimization in deep learning that has been the most cited in artificial intelligence. According to the ResearchGate scientific networking site, it has accumulated 95,460 citations.
Members of the xAI team worked with OpenAI. It is worth remembering that Musk participated in the creation of this AI startup that developed ChatGPT. In 2018, the billionaire broke the relationship with the company after being disillusioned by the approach it took.
OpenAI moved from open source research to more commercial projects. So from then on the Tesla CEO was critical of the startup, going so far as to refer to it as a “profit-maximizing demon from hell.”
Since then, the rumors that Musk had in mind to create an artificial intelligence company to compete with OpenAI have been increasing, as reported by the Financial Times or Business Insider. The latter published a report stating that the tech mogul had bought thousands of GPUs to power an upcoming generative artificial intelligence product.
