Elon Musk launches xAI to ‘understand the universe’, but nobody understands the company

Elon Musk has officially unveiled his own artificial intelligence (AI) company called xAI. The goal of the company is to “understand the true nature of the universe”, which is just about all the details we have so far.

We’ve known about Musk spinning up his own AI company since April. Documents at the time revealed that the company had been incorporated in Nevada in early March, with Musk listed as the director.

Now it’s official, with Musk announcing the company on Twitter and launching its website.

“Announcing formation of @xAI to understand reality,” Musk said.

Announcing formation of @xAI to understand reality

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 12, 2023

The website itself is relatively bare bones at the time of writing. It includes its mission statement “…to understand the true nature of the universe” as well as its team of 11 men who have worked across DeepMind, OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research, Tesla, and the University of Toronto.

“Collectively we contributed some of the most widely used methods in the field, in particular the Adam optimizer, Batch Normalization, Layer Normalization, and the discovery of adversarial examples,” the website reads.

“We further introduced innovative techniques and analyses such as Transformer-XL, Autoformalization, the Memorizing Transformer, Batch Size Scaling, and μTransfer.

“We have worked on and led the development of some of the largest breakthroughs in the field including AlphaStar, AlphaCode, Inception, Minerva, GPT-3.5, and GPT-4.”

It also notes that the business is advised by Dan Hendrycksm, the director of the Center for AI Safety. The website also states that it is looking for engineers and researchers to join the team in the Bay Area.

That’s all the information that has been released so far. But xAI will be hosting a Q&A on Twitter space at an unspecified time on July 14, which will likely be July 15 here in Australia.

xAI is not Elon Musk’s first AI company

While we don’t exactly know what xAI will do yet, earlier this year there were reports that it will be a challenger to OpenAI.

Musk actually co-founded OpenAI with Y Combinator president Sam Altman but left in 2018. The Tesla CEO said at the time there was a conflict of interest with some of the research being conducted by Tesla.

However, Musk has also publicly said that OpenAI changed since launching as an AI research business, particularly when it launched its for-profit arm.

“OpenAI was created as an open source (which is why I named it “Open” AI), non-profit company to serve as a counterweight to Google, but now it has become a closed source, maximum-profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft. Not what I intended at all,” Musk said in a tweet on February 17, 2023.

OpenAI was created as an open source (which is why I named it “Open” AI), non-profit company to serve as a counterweight to Google, but now it has become a closed source, maximum-profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft.

Not what I intended at all.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 17, 2023

Musk also signed a letter in March, alongside 1800 others, asking for a six-month pause of ‘giant’ AI experiments.

It will certainly be interesting to see what xAI plans on doing differently, especially as Musk juggles five other companies — Tesla, Neuralink, The Boring Company, SpaceX and Twitter.