Elon Musk founded an organization in Nevada called X.AI. This could lay the groundwork for a startup that could pursue his artificial intelligence ambitions.
Musk and Jared Birchall, who runs Musk’s family office, founded X.AI in March, according to Nevada filings with the Secretary of State. The document does not state the company’s purpose, and Musk did not respond to a request for comment. The Wall Street Journal previously reported the entity’s existence.
Musk has publicly criticized OpenAI, the highest-profile AI startup. In February, tech news site The Information reported that Musk approached researchers about setting up a new AI lab to rival the creators of ChatGPT and Dall-E. Igor Babushkin, a former employee of Alphabet Inc.’s DeepMind, said he and Musk discussed forming a team.
The effort could be part of Musk’s larger ambition to create a super app. The CEO of Tesla, SpaceX and Twitter has long talked about creating an “everything app” called X. He recently merged Twitter into a parent company called X Corp. bottom. creating X.
The Financial Times reported on Friday that Musk was in talks with investors at Tesla and Space Exploration Technologies Inc. about funding the AI startup, citing an unnamed person familiar with the matter.
The billionaire bought thousands of processors from Nvidia Corp. for new projects, the paper said. The news helped boost the chipmaker’s shares on Friday, with shares up as much as 1.6% following a selloff early in the session.
Musk was among a group of researchers and tech industry leaders who last month called on developers to pause training powerful AI models despite their efforts on AI.
He was also early involved in the creation of OpenAI. Musk founded the organization in 2015, where he co-chaired the organization with his current CEO, Sam Altman. His OpenAI goal at the time was to “advance digital intelligence in ways that are most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by the need to generate economic returns.”
Musk left OpenAI’s board of directors in 2018 and has since criticized OpenAI, which created a for-profit arm in 2019. He expressed his concern that it was “training AI to wake up” and said it was “effectively controlled by Microsoft.” Microsoft Corp. invested his $10 billion in his OpenAI.
Speaking about Musk’s concerns on the podcast, Altman called him a “jerk” and said he believes Musk is “very stressed about what the future holds for humanity.”
