Elon Musk announced on Wednesday the launch of a new company focused on artificial intelligence, a still mysterious project which should be revealed in more detail on Friday. “The goal of xAI is to understand the true nature of the universe,” indicates the start-up on its site, without further details. Elon Musk explained on Twitter that xAI aimed to “understand reality”. The site is announcing a question/answer session on Friday on Twitter to discuss this AI newcomer.
The company was formally incorporated in Nevada in March, according to that state’s corporate registry, but says its technical team is located in the San Francisco, California, area. When registered, xAI listed Elon Musk as its director. The billionaire admitted, several months ago, to having purchased a significant quantity of graphics cards (GPU – graphics processing unit), essential to the development of artificial intelligence (AI) software, without revealing what he intended to do with them.
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“We are a separate company from X Corp”, the holding company which notably controls Twitter, “but we will work closely with Elon Musk already controls Tesla, the aerospace company SpaceX, Twitter, as well as the tunnel boring machine The Boring Company and Neuralink, which specializes in neural implants.
The xAI team, “led by Elon Musk”, according to the site, is made up of recognized specialists in artificial intelligence, some of whom come from OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT, Google or Microsoft. During an interview on Fox with presenter Tucker Carlson in April, Elon Musk indicated that he planned to “create a third option” among AI heavyweights, in addition to Microsoft/OpenAI and Google .
The two tech giants have created the most advanced interfaces in terms of so-called generative AI, which offer written answers to all types of questions formulated in everyday language. “We are very late,” admitted the entrepreneur. He called his project “TruthGPT”, speaking of AI software “which seeks the truth as much as possible, which tries to understand the true nature of the universe”. According to Elon Musk, an artificial intelligence model “that is interested in the universe would probably not destroy the human species, because we are an interesting part of the universe. Hopefully he’ll think that way.”