Elon Musk Announces New Artificial Intelligence Venture X.AI

Tech billionaire Elon Musk has formed a new artificial intelligence company called X.AI Corp., which was reportedly incorporated in Nevada on March 9. Analysts are suggesting that Musk will use the new company to help launch the “everything app” called X that he’s referred to numerous times. Most media reports have also focused on the startup as a potential rival to OpenAI, a company Musk helped found. For now, X.AI has a handful of staff and 10,000 Nvidia GPUs, but the joint chief of Tesla and Twitter is said to be busy assembling investors and recruiting AI researchers and engineers.

According to The Wall Street Journal, a Nevada business filing says X.AI is authorized to sell 100 million shares. In addition to Musk, as director, the only other person on the filing is Jared Birchall, who runs Musk’s family office, listed as secretary. Earlier this month, Musk dissolved Twitter Inc. and moved the brand into X Corp., also incorporated in Nevada under a parent company called X Holdings, WSJ says.

Financial Times says Musk’s goal with X.AI is “to build large language model AI systems capable of ingesting enormous amounts of content and producing humanlike writing or realistic imagery, similar to the technology that powers ChatGPT.”

The new venture has reportedly hired Igor Babuschkin who previously worked for Alphabet’s DeepMind and also at OpenAI, as well as a half dozen other engineers. In February, The Information reported Musk was trying to recruit Babuschkin to “spearhead” formation of “a new research lab to develop an alternative to ChatGPT.” Musk is said to be on a hiring spree at other top AI labs.

FT says “the speed with which Musk is moving will raise eyebrows in some corners of the AI community,” only three weeks after Musk signed onto an open letter advocating a time-out on developing models more powerful than OpenAI’s GPT-4, citing safety reasons.

Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015 intending it “as a nonprofit to rival profit-minting AI tech powerhouses like Google,” according to The Information, which says “he walked away from the startup in 2018, citing disagreements with its leadership around the time it launched a for-profit arm.” According to CNBC, Musk “no longer holds a stake in the company,” which Microsoft has invested in to the tune of $11 billion.

While participating in a Twitter Spaces interview last week, Musk was asked to comment on a Business Insider report that said Twitter had purchased 10,000 Nvidia GPUs, which he tried to shrug off, saying, “Twitter and Tesla are certainly buying GPUs,” FT says, speculating on crossover: the AI venture “could use Twitter content as data to train its language model and tap Tesla for computing resources.”

“The billionaire’s potential entry to the hot generative AI market will add yet another venture to his diverse portfolio of responsibilities and investments,” says FT, citing his CEO roles at Twitter, Tesla and SpaceX. He is also still active at Neuralink, which he co-founded, and The Boring Company, which he founded.

His new “reported venture could become the latest entrant to an increasingly crowded space” that in addition to Microsoft and Google now includes Amazon, which “announced it’s entering the generative AI space on Thursday,” per CNBC.

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