Elon Musk Launches X.AI, Artificial Intelligence Startup Despite ChatGPT’s Success

New adventure for Tesla and Twitter boss? Elon Musk founded a new artificial intelligence (AI) company called X.AI based in Nevada in March, according to an official document from the registry of companies registered in that US state.

According to an article published on Friday in the Financial Times (FT), the new organization must compete with OpenAI, the California startup that developed ChatGPT, a generative artificial intelligence program capable of interacting with people and creating all kinds of texts on demand.

The success of this interface since its release at the end of November has started a real race for this promising technology. Since the end of February, various specialized media have been reporting that Elon Musk has been investing in this area.

Elon Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015 before leaving the company.

According to their anonymous sources, he recently hired Igor Babushkin and Manuel Kreuss, both of whom worked at DeepMind, the AI ​​arm of Alphabet (Google’s parent company). He is also said to have bought about 10,000 GPUs, the computers needed to train language models that are the basis of generative artificial intelligence systems.

However, last month the entrepreneur signed a call to take a break from the latest generation of AI research. Hundreds of signatories mention the various risks associated with this technology and wonder: “Is it desirable to develop non-human intelligences that could eventually surpass us in numbers and intelligence and replace us? “.

Elon Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015 before leaving the company in 2018. He has since been critical of the company, notably tweeting last December that it is training AI to be “awake” (a term for the extreme American left). i.e. “to lie”.

Passion for the letter X

X.AI’s March 9, 2023 official filing lists one director, Elon Musk, and secretary, Jared Birchall, a former Morgan Stanley banker who, according to the FT, manages the multi-billionaire’s fortune.

“X” is a math symbol that the boss of Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter, and Neuralink is especially fond of. Before acquiring Twitter, he made cryptic allusions to “X”, his vision for a universal app (messaging, social networking, financial services, etc.) like WeChat in China.

He also recently changed the name of Twitter to “X Corp”, and the social network’s headquarters is no longer in Delaware (where most American companies are located), but in Nevada. It occurs in the name of one of his children, a boy who was baptized X Æ A-12.