Elon Musk, who has been expressing his desire to develop a substitute for the widely-used ChatGPT AI chatbot, recently announced the establishment of a new venture called xAI.
Announcing formation of @xAI to understand reality
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 12, 2023
On Wednesday, xAI unveiled a website where it states that Musk will be leading the team. The team consists of experienced executives from pioneering AI companies such as Google’s DeepMind, Microsoft Corp., and Tesla Inc., along with experts from academic institutions like the University of Toronto.
Primary Objective of xAI: According to Elon Musk: “Gain a deeper understanding of the fundamental nature of the universe.“
After being a part of OpenAI’s inception, which is renowned as a prominent AI startup responsible for developing ChatGPT, Elon Musk has been openly critical of the organization since he departed from the board in 2018. His critiques have been particularly directed towards OpenAI’s decision to establish a for-profit division in the subsequent year. Musk has expressed his belief that OpenAI is “effectively controlled by Microsoft,” pointing out that Microsoft has made significant investments totalling approximately $13 billion into the company.
Among the twelve individuals mentioned on the website on Wednesday, including Elon Musk, the majority have past affiliations with Google or its London-based artificial intelligence division, DeepMind.
Christian Szegedy, for instance, held the position of research scientist at Google for several years. Additionally, individuals such as Igor Babuschkin, Zizhang Dai, Tony Wu, and Toby Pohlen are former Google employees who are part of the team.
One notable addition revealed by xAI on Wednesday is Jimmy Ba, who is widely recognized for his contributions to a highly influential paper in 2014 with Diederik Kingma, commonly referred to as the “Adam” paper, focusing on deep learning optimization techniques that are most cited in the field of artificial intelligence, with an impressive 1,49,436 citations according to Google Scholar.
According to the xAI website, it is a “separate company from X Corp,” which is the parent company that recently merged with Twitter under Musk’s leadership. However, xAI emphasizes that it will maintain close collaboration with X (Twitter), Tesla, and other affiliated companies as it moves forward.
