Elon Musk has launched a new AI company named xAI, which aims to “understand the true nature of the universe.” This announcement follows the filing of documents for a company called “X.AI Corp” earlier this year. In an April interview, Musk expressed his vision for a venture focused on developing “maximum truth-seeking AI that strives to understand the universe,” with an emphasis on creating positive impact.
While details about xAI are still emerging, Musk shared on Twitter: “Announcing formation of @xAI to understand reality.” The company’s website indicates that the team will host a Twitter Spaces chat to engage with the community.
Musk has hinted at wanting a competitive alternative to existing AI leaders like OpenAI and Google, aiming to establish a “third option” in the AI landscape. This year, he reportedly acquired a substantial number of GPUs for a Twitter-related AI project, though it's unclear if this initiative is connected to xAI.
The xAI team consists of experienced professionals from DeepMind, OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research, Tesla, and the University of Toronto. They claim to have contributed significantly to the field, developing widely used methods such as the Adam optimizer, Batch Normalization, and adversarial examples. The website also highlights their role in major breakthroughs, including AlphaStar, AlphaCode, Inception, Minerva, GPT-3.5, and GPT-4.
Key team members include Igor Babuschkin, Manuel Kroiss, Yuhuai (Tony) Wu, Christian Szegedy, Jimmy Ba, Toby Pohlen, Ross Nordeen, Kyle Kosic, Greg Yang, Guodong Zhang, and Zihang Dai.