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There are already some major players on the AI field, but that doesn’t mean that there’s no room for others. Elon Musk, who’s been talking about entering the AI field for a while, just announced that his new AI startup is launching soon. It’s called xAI, and with it, Elon Musk is looking to take AI to the next level.
What is xAI, and how does Elon Musk plan to change AI?
As stated, there are several large companies pushing AI forward. We have Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and other smaller companies. Apple is also set to debut its AI sometime down the road. A while back, we got news that Elon Musk was also planning on entering the AI blood match even before he renamed Twitter to X.
Now, he’s building out an “X” ecosystem of products, and xAI is one of them. Musk acquired thousands of high-powered Nvidia GPUs to build the LLM behind the company. We’re not sure what GPUs he purchased, but we can bet that they’re pretty expensive.
After acquiring the hardware, he needed to acquire some brain power. According to the report, Musk snapped up people from companies like Google, DeepMind, Microsoft Research, OpenAI, Tesla, and Twitter. These are people with a deep understanding of AI and have been working on some of the powerful AI that’s on the market today. Some projects these folks worked on include GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and DeepMind’s AlphaCode.
Goal
The goal of xAI is to basically understand the universe. xAI co-founder Greg Yang says that the company will dive into the “mathematics of deep learning” and “develop the ‘theory of everything’ for large neural networks”. That’s far from helping you write your mid-term exam, so xAI’s and OpenAI’s goals are very different. It looks like xAI won’t prioritize being a user-facing product.
That’s a pretty high-reaching goal, but looking at what Musk said during an interview on Fox back in April, it seems that this initiative is still fueled by his personal ambitions. This is when he unveiled the name “TruthGPT”, and he noted that the problem with AI companies was they were focusing too much on systems that are “politically correct”. At the end of the day, that’s a personal opinion, and it’s not wise to start major wide-reaching initiatives based on one’s personal opinion.
That’s one of the reasons why X (Twitter) has been in such a whirlwind since Elon took over. He can’t make it too personal. Also, as time goes on, there will be laws and regulations regarding AI. We’re not sure if they will be aligned with his personal views.
Launch date
Right now, details about this company and its AI are scarce, but we know that the company will officially launch its AI on Saturday, November 4th. When it launches, we’ll have more information about this company and what it will do.