Elon Musk’s new xAI company launches to ‘understand the true nature of the universe’
By Jay Peters and Emma Roth
Updated Jul 12, 2023
“The goal of xAI is to understand the true nature of the universe,” according to the website. The team is headed up by Elon Musk and includes team members that have worked at other big names in AI, including OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research, and DeepMind (which was recently folded into Google).
In addition to Musk, the website lists Igor Babuschkin, Manuel Kroiss, Yuhuai (Tony) Wu, Christian Szegedy, Jimmy Ba, Toby Pohlen, Ross Nordeen, Kyle Kosic, Greg Yang, Guodong Zhang, and Zihang Dai. xAI’s team is currently advised by Dan Hendrycks, a researcher who currently leads the Center for AI Safety, a nonprofit that aims to “reduce societal-scale risks associated with AI.”
The @xAI team will be hosting a Twitter Spaces discussion on July 14th, where listeners can “meet the team and ask us questions,” the website says. No specific time was given. According to xAI’s website, the company is “separate” from Musk’s overarching X Corp “but will work closely with X (Twitter), Tesla, and other companies.” Musk recently imposed strict but apparently temporary limits on reading Twitter, blaming the change on scraping by AI startups seeking data for large language models (LLMs).
Musk has been part of a major AI organization before, co-founding OpenAI in 2015. However, he walked away from it in 2018 to avoid a conflict of interest with Tesla, which also does a lot of work in the field. He’s since openly criticized OpenAI and told Tucker Carlson he was working on building something called “TruthGPT.”
