Elon Musk launches X.AI, a start-up dedicated to artificial intelligence

Elon Musk, entrepreneur and founder of Tesla and SpaceX, has created a new artificial intelligence (AI) company called X.AI. Based in Nevada, the startup aims to compete with OpenAI, the California-based company that designed ChatGPT, an AI program capable of interacting with humans and producing texts on demand. The success ofChatGPThas caused a real race for this high potential technology. According to anonymous sources, Elon Musk recently recruited Igor Babuschkin and Manuel Kroiss, two AI experts who worked for DeepMind, the AI arm of Alphabet (Google’s parent company). In addition, he would have also bought 10,000 graphics processors, necessary to train language models, the foundation of generative AI systems. Despite Elon Musk’s investment in this field, he signed a call last month to pause research on next-generation AI. In this call, the signatories mention various risks related to this technology and question the relevance of developing non-human minds. These experts believe that these AIs could eventually surpass us in numbers and intelligence. Elon Musk co-foundedOpenAIin 2015 and left it in 2018. Since then, he has been critical of the company, including that AI is trained to be “woke” (a term for a fringe of the American left) and to “lie.” Liking to cultivate mystery, the “X” symbol is a recurring motif in Elon Musk’s projects. As a proof, he recently changed the name of Twitter to “X Corp” and talked about his vision of an all-purpose application (messaging, social network, financial services…), similar to WeChat in China. Moreover, the name of one of his children, X Æ A-12, also reflects this preference. If X.AI succeeds in competing with OpenAI, it will add a new player to the already intense competition between technology companies to develop more powerful AI models. Google and Amazon have already announced initiatives in the AI space. In the future, it is certain that even more companies will be added to the list.