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Elon Musk Launches xAI: A New Rival To OpenAI’s ChatGPT

Twitter boss formally enters artificial intelligence race by launching xAI to compete with OpenAI

by aayushi.samdani
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Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk has finally launched his much-anticipated artificial intelligence startup, xAI on Wednesday. In a bid to create a viable alternative to ChatGPT, Musk has assembled a talented team of engineers hailing from major U.S. technology companies that he aims to challenge.

While already serving as the CEO of Tesla, SpaceX, and owner of Twitter, Musk is determined to also lead this new venture. Notably, he has been vocal about the need to regulate AI development and has expressed concerns about its potential for significant societal impact, even referring to it as a potential threat to civilization.

Musk has launched the artificial intelligence (AI) company to directly challenge ChatGPT creator OpenAI, which the billionaire tech mogul has accused of being “woke”. On July 12, xAI said in a tweet that the goal of the new company would be to “understand the true nature of the universe”.

About xAI’s much-anticipated launch

Although Elon has argued on several occasions that the development of AI should be paused and that the sector needed some kind of regulation or else it could prove to be destructive. Musk has repeatedly voiced concerns about AI’s potential for “civilization destruction”.

He also accused Larry Page, co-founder of Google, of not taking AI safety seriously.

“I’m going to start something which I call ‘TruthGPT’, or a maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe,” Musk was seen quoting in an interview which was featured on various channels.

He said TruthGPT “might be the best path to safety” that would be “unlikely to annihilate humans”. As committed Musk incorporated the company legally, back in April 2023, and finally launched the company yesterday.

Elon Musk formally launched xAI, an artificial intelligence company on 12 July 2023, aiming to challenge the dominance of Sam Altman’s OpenAI (which was launched in November last year) and he claims that with the help of the new company, the world will “understand the true nature of the universe”.

The team behind xAI

Musk will be leading the new company along with former employees of other leading AI research labs like OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Tesla, DeepMind, and the University of Toronto, says the new company’s website. And Dan Hendrycks, the director of the Center for AI Safety would be advising the company to “reduce societal-scale risks associated with AI.”

Hendrycks was the person behind organizing an open letter warning earlier this year, that AI could pose existential risks to humanity, a concern echoed by Musk and Sam Altman also agree to the fact.

The Twitter owner and Tesla and SpaceX boss, Elon Musk has also secured thousands of GPU processors from Nvidia, which are required to build large language models that consume vast amounts of content. And now we know what it is supposed to be working on.

However, it is still not clear how or whether Elon will attempt to commercialize his own AI research efforts and ambition for xAI.The company’s website carries scant details beyond that it has a dozen strong, all-male founding teams for xAI.

On Twitter, Musk wrote that xAI was being formed to “understand reality”, giving no further details. But we can expect an interface soon as the xAI team will hold a Twitter Spaces chat on July 14th.

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