OpenAI Co-founder Elon Musk is dabbling in the business of AI again. His new company is called X.AI Corp. Jared Birchall, who runs Musk’s family office, is currently serving as its secretary.
Elon Musk is one of the co-founders of Open AI. In 2015, Elon Musk was its biggest supporter. At that time, one of OpenAI’s goals was to “advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return”.
The story between OpenAI and Elon Musk
In 2018, he stepped down from the board because there were several conflicts in terms of his AI research at Tesla. However, according to the US website Semafor, his main reason for leaving Open AI is due to a power struggle with his co-founders. At the time, Musk was unhappy with the development of the start-up. He felt it had fallen behind Google in AI development.
Besides, Musk reportedly failed in his attempt to completely take over OpenAI when OpenAI’s current CEO, Sam Altman, and other co-founders rejected Musk’s offer. Meanwhile, Musk reportedly invested $100 million of a planned $1 billion in OpenAI.
Elon Musk’s up-down Relationship with AI
Recently, Musk signed AI Pause open letter. It calls OpenAI’s developments “extremely concerning” in terms of safety conditions. He explains,
“Recent months have seen AI Labs locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one – not even their creators – can understand, predict, or reliably control”
Besides, Musk also blamed Microsoft’s heavy involvement in OpenAI, which would indirectly be taken over by the software giant. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman responded to the Wall Street Journal’s X.AI reveal on Twitter with an ironic ‘”concerning”.
During the years that lead up to OpenAI’s breakthrough, Elon Musk has kept expressing his concern about the evolution of AI. In 2020, for example, he mentions in his interview with The New York Times.
“My assessment about why A.I is overlooked by very smart people is that very smart people do not think a computer can ever be as smart as they are”
AI was on its way to becoming “vastly smarter than humans” and could reach that goal as early as 2025.
Elon Musk is getting back into AI Business
In recent months, OpenAI has become a huge recognisable name on the backs of technology like ChatGPT and GPT-4 and is partially responsible for kicking off Microsoft and Google’s current push to integrate AI tools more deeply into many of its products.
The new company, X.AI, is part of a wider plan to create a so-called everything app. Earlier this week, Musk announced Twitter Inc had been merged into new umbrella company X Corp. Its domicile is shifting from Delaware to Nevada.
In details, “X” is Musk’s vision of an app for everything. It’s a single-use software that. of daily life and work, from social media to payments, to, apparently, artificial intelligence.
According to Business Insider, Musk has reported set up a research lab, with former OpenAI and Deepmind researcher Igor Babushkin in a leading role. In addition to, Musk has purchased thousands of graphics cards, which are typically used to train large AI models. Therefore, we can confirm that Elon Musk is working on a ChatGPT alternative.