If the river makes a noise its because water is running. A few days ago we learned that the controversial South African businessman had bought 10,000 extremely expensive graphics cards with one goal in mind: to train artificial intelligence. But hadn’t he called for the giant AI experiments to stop? Yes, but not yours: Elon Musk has a new business project focused on artificial intelligence. His name is X.AI.
The X.AI name leaves little to the imagination . On the one hand, the acronym for AI for artificial intelligence. On the other, the X of Elon Musk’s highest aspiration: to create a super application for everything called that. In fact, the story of the billionaire with this letter goes back a long way: from Space X to Model X, going through the X.com domain that he bought in 2007 for Paypal or, more recently, the change of name of Twitter Inc. to X Corp..
The Wall Street Journal has detected the registration of X.AI Corp in the state of Nevada with Elon Musk as the sole CEO of the company, with Jared Birchall as secretary. More members of its organization chart are unknown. What we do know thanks to the data from this registry is that X.AI has already authorized the sale of 100 million shares of the company in search of private capital to carry out its projects in this area, although nothing concrete yet and with name.
X.AI wants to find the new ChatGPT
What there is evidence of is that Elon Musk has been building an artificial intelligence research team for months to establish himself as a competitor to OpenAI, the company behind the popular ChatGPT in its different versions and whose success is such that it has become the fastest growing platform in internet history.
The billionaire co-founded OpenAI eight years ago, but left disappointed in 2018 after having power struggles with Sam Altman, its current CEO. After his departure, Elon Musk has spoken out about OpenAI and its creations, generally critically. And it is that although he considers ChatGPT “terrifyingly good” he has complained about the “politically correct” limitations imposed by its creators, urging those who work with the company to seek the truth.
As we anticipated in the intro, a few weeks ago Musk was one of the signatories urging to pause the most advanced research in artificial intelligence for at least six months so that the industry established security and design standards to try to minimize potential future risks. A statement with all the sense in the world coming from some of the specialized personalities, but seen in perspective and knowing Musk’s plans, also a way to buy time.
Thus, Musk has been in talks for months with Igor Babuschkin to lead his project, an artificial intelligence researcher specializing in machine learning models and whose resume includes his time at DeepMind. Likewise, and according to the Wall Street Journal, the South African businessman has knocked on the door of the OpenAI team to continue configuring his template, without much success.
After overcoming these initial phases and the constitution of the company, the billionaire thus independently joins this dizzying career of artificial intelligence, if he is successful and manages to develop an artificial intelligence model capable of rivaling tools as powerful as GPT- 4, the new Bing with ChatGPT or Google Bard.
