Elon Musk has officially launched a new artificial intelligence startup called xAI.
Few details have been revealed about xAI, but according to AP News, Musk has brought together some of the world’s brightest minds and top AI researchers for the project. Some individuals involved in Musk’s new San Francisco-based startup include former employees from Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Tesla.
Last Wednesday’s launch of the company could mark a pivotal shift in the dialogue around AI. Musk has been a strong proponent of regulating the relatively new technology and has repeatedly voiced concerns over potential threats AI could pose to society and human civilization.
“I think there should be a regulatory body established for overseeing AI to make sure that it does not present a danger to the public,” Musk previously told the BBC.
At the end of 2022, OpenAI — a nonprofit co-founded by Musk — rolled out ChatGPT, a language processing tool driven by AI technology. Following the commercial success of ChatGPT, many users were quick to point out the apparent far-left bias in many of its responses.
Musk himself has taken swipes at the organization on multiple occasions, reportedly telling CNBC, “It does seem weird that something can be a nonprofit, open-source and somehow transform itself into a for-profit, closed source.”
During an interview with Tucker Carlson back in April, Musk criticized OpenAI for allegedly training the language model to provide biased and false answers. Due to Musk’s concerns about AI’s potential for harm, he said he would develop his own “maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe.”
“The idea is that an AI that wants to understand humanity is less likely to destroy it,” Musk told Carlson.
While xAI will operate independently from Musk’s other companies, Musk confirmed during a July 14 Twitter Spaces event that some collaborative work would be needed “to make progress towards our mission.”
The company’s website currently does not contain much additional information about the project, but it does claim the startup will “share more information over the next couple of weeks and months.”