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Elon Musk, the billionaire entrepreneur, launched his long-teased artificial intelligence startup on Wednesday, hoping to challenge the dominance of his former company OpenAI's chatbot, ChatGPT.
Key points:
- Elon Musk's xAI startup will include big names from Google and Microsoft
- The company will be separate from Mr Musk's X Corp, but will work closely with Twitter, Tesla and other companies
- Mr Musk has repeatedly warned of the risks of AI, going so far as to call for its development to be paused for six months
The startup, called xAI, will be led by Mr Musk, who is already the CEO of electric car maker Tesla, CEO of rocket launch company SpaceX and owner of Twitter.
He has also repeatedly voiced concerns about AI's potential for "civilisational destruction", saying on several occasions that its development should be paused and that the sector needs regulation.
In a Twitter Spaces event on Wednesday evening, Mr Musk explained his plan for building a safer AI.
Rather than explicitly programming morality into its AI, xAI will seek to create a "maximally curious" AI, he said.
"If it tried to understand the true nature of the universe, that's actually the best thing that I can come up with from an AI safety standpoint," Mr Musk said.
"I think it is going to be pro-humanity from the standpoint that humanity is just much more interesting than not-humanity."
He also predicted that superintelligence, or AI that is smarter than humans, will arrive in five or six years.
Mr Musk had said in April that he would launch TruthGPT, a "maximum truth-seeking AI" that tries to understand the nature of the universe, to rival Google's Bard and Microsoft's Bing AI.
xAI team includes Google, Microsoft alums
Mr Musk in March registered a firm named X.AI Corp, incorporated in Nevada, according to a state filing.
The firm lists Mr Musk as the sole director and Jared Birchall, the managing director of Mr Musk's family office, as a secretary.
The team at xAI includes Igor Babuschkin, a former engineer at Google's DeepMind; Tony Wu, who worked at Google; Christian Szegedy, who was also a research scientist at Google; and Greg Yang, who was previously at Microsoft.
Dan Hendrycks, who will advise the xAI team, is currently director of the Center for AI Safety, and his work revolves around the risks of AI.
Mr Musk's new company is separate from X Corp, but will work closely with Twitter, Tesla and other companies, according to the website.
Mr Musk co-founded OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, in 2015, but stepped down from the company's board in 2018.
Reuters/ABC