Musk announces new AI company aiming to ‘understand the universe’ – Ars Technica

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Elon Musk speaks via video link at the opening ceremony of the World Conference on Artificial Intelligence (WAIC) in Shanghai on July 6, 2023.
Expanding / Elon Musk speaks via video link at the opening ceremony of the World Conference on Artificial Intelligence (WAIC) in Shanghai on July 6, 2023.

Rebecca Bailey/AFP via Getty Images

On Wednesday, Elon Musk formally announced the creation of xAI. xAI, a company aimed at understanding the “true nature of the universe,” will gather talent from industry veterans to take on OpenAI’s popular chatbot ChatGPT. Musk has publicly criticized OpenAI in the past.

According to Bloomberg, the creation of xAI dates back to March when Musk and Musk’s family office operator Jared Virtual incorporated a business in Nevada named “X.AI.” In keeping with the unconventional name, the company’s website domain name is ‘x.ai’. In April, reports surfaced that Musk was in ongoing talks with investors in Tesla and SpaceX regarding potential funding for the new AI startup. Around that time, Musk reported that he had purchased thousands of GPUs from Nvidia for his AI.

The new company said on its website that Musk himself will lead a core team and draw on AI industry veterans from tech giants such as Google’s DeepMind, Microsoft and Tesla, as well as talent from academic institutions. University of Toronto.

Screenshot of the x.AI website on July 12, 2023.
Expanding / Screenshot of the x.AI website on July 12, 2023.

Ars Technica

That list includes Igor Babuschkin (formerly DeepMind), Manuel Kroiss (DeepMind), Tony Wu (University of Toronto), and Christian Szegedy (Google Research). Also named are Jimmy Barr, Toby Polen, Ross Nordine, Kyle Kosick, Greg Yang, Guodong Chan and Jihan Dai. Previous machine learning work by this group includes the Adam optimizer, batch normalization, layer normalization, Transformer-XL, automatic formalization, and adversarial examples that trick AI models into producing erroneous output. including discoveries.

Although xAI is an independent organization from X Corp, it will maintain close ties with other Musk companies such as Twitter and Tesla to achieve its mission.

Earlier this year, Musk joined a chorus of researchers and tech industry luminaries calling for a six-month moratorium on training AI models “more powerful than GPT-4.” The seemingly contradictory move to create a company that could accelerate advances in AI illustrates Mr. Musk’s complex and sometimes fickle relationship with an area he considers potentially dangerous, but business cannot be ignored from the point of view of

In line with this, xAI also announced that Dan Hendrycks, currently director of the AI ​​Alignment Research Group Center for AI Safety, will be an advisor to the team. The AI ​​Safety Center warned of a “risk of extinction” from AI in his second open letter published in May.

xAI is We will be hosting a chat on Friday, July 14th to give the public an opportunity to ask questions. The company also announced that it is actively recruiting experienced engineers and researchers for its Bay Area-based technical staff.





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