According to a new business filing in Nevada, billionaire Tesla and Twitter chief Elon Musk has started a new artificial intelligence company, X.AI.
The March 9, 2023 filing shows Musk listed as the sole director, with Jared Birchall being the secretary.
“AI is more dangerous than, say, mismanaged aircraft design or production maintenance or bad car production,” Musk said in an interview airing Monday with Fox News’ Tucker Carlson. “In the sense that it has the potential — however small one may regard that probability, but it is non-trivial — it has the potential of civilization destruction.”
Financial Times reported, “For the new project, Musk has secured thousands of high-powered GPU processors from Nvidia, said people with knowledge of the move. GPUs are the high-end chips required for his aim to build a large language model — AI systems capable of ingesting enormous amounts of content and producing humanlike writing or realistic imagery, similar to the technology that powers ChatGPT.”
The outlet further reported:
Musk is recruiting engineers from top AI labs including DeepMind, according to those with knowledge of his plans, who said he began to explore the idea of a rival company earlier this year in response to the rapid progress of OpenAI.
Musk has brought on Igor Babuschkin, a former DeepMind employee, and roughly half a dozen other engineers. The Information previously reported Babuschkin’s early talks with Musk.
In a recent letter Musk signed calling for a pause in the training of AI systems, it read, “AI systems with human-competitive intelligence can pose profound risks to society and humanity, as shown by extensive research and acknowledged by top AI labs.”
“Tesla was competing for some of the same people as OpenAI & I didn’t agree with some of what OpenAI team wanted to do,” Musk tweeted in 2019, adding that it was “better to part ways on good terms.”
“While this venture, like many of Musk’s, may fall far short of the mark, there is no arguing that his activity in an industry tends to agitate it. One does not have to topple the market leader to influence events and gain a seat at the table — often all it takes is billions of dollars. And that is something Musk reliably seems to have at his disposal,” wrote TechCrunch’s Devin Coldewey regarding the speculation.