Musk launches startup xAI aimed at “understanding the nature of the universe”

American billionaire Elon Musk has announced the launch of a new AI company called xAI. Its goal is to understand reality, declared businessman on his Twitter.

“Announcing the creation of xAI to understand reality,” he wrote.

The project site, in turn, notesthat xAI is meant to “understand the true nature of the universe”. An online event on Twitter Spaces, during which the project team will answer questions from users, will take place on July 14.

How draws According to Reuters, the team featured on the project’s website is made up of engineers who have worked for the same tech giants that Musk will now compete with in AI. So, the team included former DeepMind engineer Igor Babushkin, ex-Google employees Christian Szegedi and Tony Wu, and Greg Yang, who previously worked at Microsoftand etc.

Techcrunch in turn indicates that many of them specialize in large language models like OpenAI’s GPT-4. The portal also recalls that Musk has previously purchased thousands of GPUs to power the future generative AI model.

The registration of xAI became known in April of this year. In the same month, Musk said about plans to create an alternative to the ChatGPT neural network called TruthGPT, which was supposed to try to “understand the nature of the universe.”

In late March, the Future of Life Institute published a letter calling for an “immediate suspension” of AI systems training. The petition was then signed by Musk, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, philanthropist Andrew Yang, and about a thousand other researchers. According to the institute, AI should be developed “only when we are confident that its effects will be positive and the risks manageable.”

In November 2022, the American company OpenAI, of which Musk was one of the founders (withdrew from the project in 2018), launched the ChatGPT chat bot, which is capable of generating texts, writing codes and answering questions. The neural network was able to collect the first million users in just five days. After that, many large corporations began to announce plans to introduce AI technologies into their products and present their alternatives to ChatGPT. In April, for example, Alibaba Group introduced Generative AI model of Tongyi Qianwen for enterprise communication, e-commerce, web search, etc.