Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, Inc., is reportedly raising funds to establish a new artificial intelligence startup that will compete with OpenAI LLC. According to sources, the endeavor had been planned earlier this year, resulting in Musk hiring around six AI engineers, including former Alphabet Inc.’s DeepMind Machine Learning Unit’ employee Igor Babuschkin.
The new startup, which is yet to be named, is also reportedly backed by outside investors who have funded SpaceX Corp. and Tesla. While the exact amount of capital Musk is trying to raise remains unknown, developing advanced AI systems usually requires expensive hardware and billions of dollars in investments.
The said startup is likely to focus on large language models known as ChatGPT, the same technology that OpenAI’s GPT-4 is built upon, as reported by Business Insider. The news of Musk’s plans to boost developments in AI technology comes weeks after the tech entrepreneur co-signed a letter urging the industry to pause the advancements of neural networks for at least six months.
To train its AI models, Musk’s company is said to be using massive amounts of data from Twitter, to be processed with Nvidia Corp. GPUs. The specific models of the hardware remain unknown. Different GPUs offer different performance results, with the newest, the H100, able to get up to nine times faster than the previous generation A100 chip.
Customized hardware and infrastructure could potentially be employed in the venture, going beyond pre-configured hardware and components. Tesla Inc., which Musk is also leading, operates two supercomputers designed for artificial intelligence. One of them supposedly consists of 7,360 NVIDIA A100 GPUs. Another one, known as Dojo D1, is built on a chip that blends CPU elements and circuits enhanced for machine learning.
Presently, the market of generative AI technology is highly competitive, with OpenAI having Microsoft as one of its biggest backers. Google LLC and Meta Platforms Inc. are also developing similar products, with many startup companies also involved in this field.
OpenAI LLC was established in December 2015, by tech experts Musk, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, among others. It is an AI research laboratory, whose main purpose is to create safe and beneficial AI. In its mission statement, the company indicated that it aims to advance digital intelligence to the same level or beyond human capability.
Elon Musk has had a highly successful career so far, having established companies such as Tesla, Inc., SpaceX Corp, and The Boring Company. The South African-born entrepreneur is noted for his ability to think outside the box and disrupt traditional industries. Musk is also a philanthropist and a great believer in the possibilities of AI technology.
