Tech billionaire and entrepreneur, Elon Musk has recently formed a new artificial intelligence (AI) company in Nevada called X.AI Corp. The Wall Street Journal reported that Musk is listed as the director of the company, while Jared Birchall, his right-hand man, is listed as the company’s secretary.
This comes as a surprise since Musk publicly called for a six-month pause in the development of AI tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. However, it seems that Musk is still very interested in developing his own AI despite his previous statements. Musk helped co-found OpenAI in 2015 but left the company after a power struggle in 2018.
In recent weeks, Musk has made significant hires from the world of AI, including Igor Babuschkin and Manuel Kroiss, who were hired from DeepMind, the AI arm of Alphabet, the parent company of Google.
Last month, it was assumed that Musk would work on AI under the umbrella of Twitter, a company he purchased in October 2022. However, Musk has made it clear that he intends to develop AI with his new independent company in Nevada. In fact, Twitter Inc. was dissolved as a company this week and was replaced by a new company that Musk calls X. This move is seen as an attempt to build a social media platform that also allows payments, turning it into an “everything app” similar to how WeChat works in China.
It is evident that Musk’s call for a six-month pause was purely out of self-interest in the AI arms race. ChatGPT has become a fascinating tool for people who want to experiment with large language models (LLMs) that answer questions posed in natural language. However, there are still many kinks to be worked out since ChatGPT will often give confident answers, even when it’s wrong.
AI is still in its early stages, and it is largely a “magic trick” that sometimes spouts nonsense that users may not know enough about to fact-check. Nonetheless, it is an interesting and exciting field that will undoubtedly improve as more people in the world of tech become involved.
Musk knows he is behind in the most exciting development on the web since social media went mainstream in the late 2000s. However, the billionaire clearly does not intend to stay behind for long.
