Elon Musk launches new AI start-up to rival ChatGPT

Elon Musk has launched a new AI start-up to rival ChatGPT, having revealed his new baby to the world yesterday (Wednesday 12 July).

The billionaire has, of course, dabbled in such technology before, having co-founded OpenAI – the company behind ChatGPT – as a non-profit in 2015.

However, he stepped down from the company’s board just three years later, citing a conflict of interest with his work at Tesla.

Now Musk has a new artificial intelligence startup, called xAI, saying its goals are to ‘understand reality’.

In a Twitter Spaces event last night, Musk laid out how he plans to build a safer AI model, saying xAI hopes to create a ‘maximally curious’ AI, as opposed to programming morality into it.

"If it tried to understand the true nature of the universe, that's actually the best thing that I can come up with from an AI safety standpoint," he said.

"I think it is going to be pro-humanity from the standpoint that humanity is just much more interesting than not-humanity."

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According to Reuters, Musk registered a firm named X.AI Corp back in March, citing a state filing.

The firm lists Musk as the sole director and Jared Birchall, who is the managing director of Musk's family office, as a secretary.

The company's website, which has a tagline of ‘Understand the Universe’, said people will be able to fully ‘meet the team’ and ask questions during another Twitter Spaces chat event on Friday 14 July.

“The goal of xAI is to understand the true nature of the universe,” it said, adding: “Our team is led by Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX.

"We have previously worked at 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. We further introduced innovative techniques and analyses such as Transformer-XL, Autoformalization, the Memorizing Transformer, Batch Size Scaling, and μTransfer.

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"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.”

Musk has previously warned about the dangers of AI, saying super-intelligence was a ‘double edged sword’.

Speaking to the Wall Street Journal's (WSJ) CEO Council Summit in London earlier this year, he said: "If you have a genie that can grant you anything, that presents a danger.”

He went on: "So just having more advanced weapons on the battlefield that can react faster than any human could is really what AI is capable of.

"Any future wars between advanced countries or at least countries with drone capability will be very much the drone wars."