Elon Musk has created a new company called xAI, which appears to be working on a competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
The site for xAI went live today with an official announcement of the company’s formation. “The goal of xAI is to understand the true nature of the universe,” the page says.
The statement is likely a reference to an interview Musk had with former Fox News pundit Tucker Carlson, where he talked about his plan to build his own AI-powered chatbot to counter what he perceived to be the political correctness and alleged lies produced by ChatGPT.
“So yeah, I’m going to start something called TruthGPT. Or a maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe,” Musk said in April. That same month, Musk was spotted quietly filing paperwork to establish X.AI Corp.
Details about xAI, which is based in San Francisco, remain thin. For now, its website merely lists Musk and 10 other people as staff members. “We have previously worked at DeepMind, OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research, Tesla, and the University of Toronto,” it notes.
Staff members include Igor Babuschkin, a researcher who worked at Google’s DeepMind AI lab; Manuel Kroiss, another DeepMind alum; and Kyle Kosic, who previously worked at OpenAI. Together, the team has contributed to and led development of several AI programs, including the StarCraft game-playing bot AlphaStar and OpenAI’s GPT 3.5 and GPT 4, the large language models that power ChatGPT.
Musk's xAI is separate from X Corp, Twitter's new parent company. “But will work closely with X (Twitter), Tesla, and other companies to make progress towards our mission,” the xAI site adds.
On Friday, xAI will host a chat on Twitter Spaces to answer questions from the public. The startup is also looking to recruit more engineers and researchers.