The xAI website said the company is being advised by Dan Hendrycks, who is the director of the Center for AI Safety — a group that has warned about what it sees as existential dangers of developing AI quickly. This spring, it released a letter of caution signed by chief executive officers of some of the leading companies in AI, including Alphabet’s DeepMind and OpenAI.

Musk, 52, now oversees six companies: Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter, Neuralink, the Boring Co. and now xAI. In regulatory filings, Tesla says the auto giant is “increasingly focused on products and services based on artificial intelligence, robotics and automation.” Tesla’s website invites people to help “build the future of artificial intelligence” with a variety of products, from the “Tesla Bot” known as Optimus to AI interface chips that will run the electric automaker’s automated driving software.

Musk has a long history of borrowing engineers from one company to help out at another, as the contours of his ever-expanding empire bleed into one another.

Tesla and SpaceX share a vice president of materials engineering, for example, and engineers from Tesla “volunteered” to work at Twitter after Musk bought the company for $US44 billion in October.

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The xAI website says that it is a “separate company from X Corp,” the parent company that Musk merged Twitter into earlier this year, but that it will “work closely with X (Twitter), Tesla, and other companies.”

Bloomberg

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