Elon Musk launches AI firm xAI as he looks to take on OpenAI

July 12 (Reuters) – Elon Musk, the billionaire entrepreneur, launched his long-teased artificial intelligence startup xAI on Wednesday, unveiling a team of engineers from the same major U.S. tech companies he hopes to challenge in his bid to build an alternative to ChatGPT.

The startup will be led by Musk, already CEO of electric car maker Tesla ( TSLA.O ), CEO of rocket launch company SpaceX and owner of Twitter, who has said on several occasions that the development of artificial intelligence should be paused and that the sector needs regulation. Musk has repeatedly voiced concerns about AI’s potential for “civilizational destruction.”

In a Twitter Spaces event Wednesday night, Musk explained his plan to build a safer AI. Rather than explicitly programming morality into its AI, xAI will attempt to create a “maximally curious” AI, he said.

“If it was trying to understand the true nature of the universe, that’s actually the best I can come up with from an AI safety standpoint,” Musk said. “I think it’s going to be pro-human from the point of view that humanity is just much more interesting than non-humanity.”

Musk also predicted that superintelligence, or AI that is smarter than humans, will arrive in five or six years.

Musk co-founded OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, in 2015, but resigned from the company’s board in 2018.

Microsoft is an investor in OpenAI.

The website for xAI said it will hold a Twitter Spaces event on July 14.

The team at xAI includes Igor Babuschkin, a former engineer at Google’s DeepMind; Tony Wu, who worked at Google ; Christian Szegedy, who was also a researcher at Google; and Greg Yang, formerly of Microsoft.

Musk in March registered a company called X.AI Corp, incorporated in Nevada, according to a state filing. The firm lists Musk as sole director and Jared Birchall, managing director of Musk’s family office, as secretary.

Musk had said in April that he would launch TruthGPT, or a maximum truth-seeking AI to compete with Google’s Bard and Microsoft’s ( MSFT.O ) Bing AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe.

Generative AI grabbed the limelight with OpenAI’s launch of the popular chatbot ChatGPT, which arrived last November, ahead of the launch of Bard and Bing AI.

Dan Hendrycks, who will advise the xAI team, is currently the director of the Center for AI Safety and his work focuses on the risks of AI.

Musk’s new company is separate from X Corp, but will work closely with Twitter, Tesla and other companies, according to the website.

xAI said it is recruiting experienced engineers and researchers in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Reporting by Akash Sriram, Chavi Mehta, Yuvraj Malik and Aditya Soni in Bengaluru, Anna Tong in San Francisco; Editing by Shailesh Kuber and Leslie Adler

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