Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk has recently come out from under the shade of caution surrounding artificial intelligence (AI) that he previously marked it with, opting instead to join the fray with the launch of his own AI company, X.AI. According to reports from the Wall Street Journal, Musk incorporated X.AI Corporation on March 9 of this year, with Jared Birchall, the former Morgan Stanley banker who manages Musk’s wealth, as the secretary.
The development of the new corporation came only mere weeks after Musk signed the “Pause Giant AI Experiments” letter. The letter, written and signed by experts like Steve Wozniak, Gary Marcus, and Yuval Noval Harari, called for an immediate halt on developing giant AI systems beyond GPT-4 for the next six months due to safety concerns. This is in addition to the set of seven policies introduced, which included audits and certifications for the AI industry.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was quick to take a jab at the former co-founder of OpenAI and his dive into generative AI after the WSJ report was released. This was a direct reference from Musk’s own tweet expressing ‘extreme concern’ when OpenAI had released APIs for its ChatGPT service.
The anxiety over Musk’s latest move is exacerbated by his erratic behaviour in the past where he has made sensationalist comments about AI. Going as far as to label it “more dangerous than nukes” and claiming it will one day become sentient and be smarter than humans, creating an existential risk for the entire human race. Adding fuel to the fire, Musk recently purchased vast numbers of GPUs, which are typically used to train large AI models as well as recruiting two researchers from DeepMind to create a rival to OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
With recent reports claiming that Musk is in talks with investors from SpaceX and Tesla to secure funding for the venture, speculation can only increase over what the enigmatic entrepreneur plans to do with his new AI company. Some have suggested that Musk may model X.AI’s platform off of China’s Wechat superapp, which offers a wide range of services from gaming to banking on one platform. Others have posited that Musk’s X.A.I Corp will be an AI-powered superapp, made possible by data from Twitter, potentially harnessing Tesla’s computational resources.
All in all, only time will tell what’s to come from Elon Musk’s X.AI Corp and to what extent the company will lead the charge in the development of AI. As it stands, it’s clear that Musk has set his sights on a new challenge and with the intention to disrupt the AI industry in a big way.
