Elon Musk forms xAI, AI company with OpenAI, Google researchers

Musk has been talking about xAI for months, and registered a new company with that name in Nevada in March. On Wednesday, he unveiled a team of 11 employees, drawn from OpenAI, Google and the University of Toronto, a center for academic AI research. The company is separate from Twitter and Musk’s other companies, SpaceX and Tesla, but will work closely with them, according to the website.

Tesla, which has been working on building self-driving cars for years, already has a robust AI team and a massive supply of number-crunching computers, which are crucial for training the complex “big-language models” that power chatbots like e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT the ability to have conversations, write code and pass professional exams. And Twitter is a wealth of data that can help you train any large-language model.

“The goal of xAI is to understand the true nature of the universe,” the website says.

Musk and Tesla spokespeople did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

It is unclear how xAI and Tesla would work together, as Tesla is a public company with a broad base of investors. When Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion last year, he was criticized for pulling engineers from Tesla to help in the early weeks of his ownership of the company.

Musk has been vocal about AI for years and was an early proponent of the belief that humans should be cautious about developing smarter computers, fearing that super-intelligent AI could one day escape human control. He was a founding member of ChatGPT creator OpenAI, but left the company’s board in 2018 and has recently criticized its transformation from a non-profit to a for-profit company. In an interview with CNBC in May, Musk said he was “the reason why OpenAI exists” and that the company did not take AI security concerns seriously.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said that Musk is a “jerk” but that he believes the billionaire cares about the future of AI and humanity.

Musk’s new AI team includes University of Toronto assistant professor Jimmy Ba, an AI researcher who trained under AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton, Toby Pohlen, a former researcher at Google’s DeepMind AI lab, and Christian Szegedy, who also did research for Google .

Dan Hendrycks, the director of the Center for AI Safety, which advocates for greater awareness of the risk of AI slipping out of human control, advises the company. Hendrycks said he only takes a $1 salary so he can “remain objective and have no incentive to limit my criticism.”

XAI represents yet another company Musk is responsible for, adding to Twitter, SpaceX, Tesla and a handful of other, smaller businesses. Tesla investors have complained since Musk bought Twitter that he is stretching himself too thin and shirking his duty to his other companies.

The competition in AI is fierce now. Google, Microsoft and other Big Tech companies have poured billions of dollars into AI research for years, integrating their breakthroughs into existing products like Google Search or to make their data centers more efficient. Last year, OpenAI started a new wave of excitement around the technology by releasing ChatGPT directly to consumers, giving them the opportunity to see the advancements in AI technology that have been taking place.

That spurred Microsoft and Google to speed up their own efforts to build AI tools that people can use directly, with Microsoft signing a massive deal to use OpenAI’s technology, while Google has rushed its own competing products. Startups like Anthropic and Cohere are also building their own large-scale language models, relying on partnerships with Big Tech or massive venture capital funding to get the computational power needed to train AI on their own.