Elon Musk opens new AI company, xAI

Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, and owner of Twitter, on Wednesday announced the debut of a new AI company, xAI, with the goal to “understand the true nature of the universe.” According to the company’s website, Musk, and his team will share more information in a live Twitter Spaces chat on Friday.

Team members behind xAI are alumni of DeepMind, OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research, and Tesla, according to the company’s website, and have worked on projects including DeepMind’s AlphaCode and OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 chatbots. Musk seems to be positioning xAI to compete with companies like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, which are behind leading chatbots like ChatGPT, Bard, and Claude.

News of the startup was previously reported by The Financial Times in April, the same month Musk shared details of his plans for a new AI tool called “TruthGPT” during a taped interview on Fox News Channel, adding that he feared existing AI companies are prioritizing systems that are “politically correct.”

Musk reportedly incorporated the company in Nevada in March. Previously, he had changed the name of Twitter to “X Corp” in some financial filings, but on xAI’s website, the company notes its separation from X Corp, adding that it will “work closely with X (Twitter), Tesla, and other companies to make progress towards our mission.”

Musk has been part of a major AI organization before, co-founding OpenAI in 2015. However, he walked away from it in 2018 to avoid a conflict of interest with Tesla, which also does a lot of work in the field. He’s since openly criticized OpenAI and told Tucker Carlson he was working on building something called “TruthGPT.”