(Photo Illustration by Rafael Henrique/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Elon Musk’s newest startup, xAI, debuted just a few months ago, but the company is already close to shipping its first system, Musk says.
"Tomorrow, xAI will release its first AI to a select group. In some important respects, it is the best that currently exists," Musk tweeted today.
He didn't say much else, including the scope of the AI system. But he’s repeatedly talked about developing a competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which he claims possesses a bias toward “political correctness.” (Musk helped found OpenAI but cut ties in 2018 and has been publicly critical of the company ever since.)
“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 told former Fox News pundit Tucker Carlson in April. To create the chatbot, Musk hired about a dozen engineers and researchers from Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI to help him run the San Francisco-based xAI.
Recommended by Our Editors
Musk also said the startup will harvest data on Twitter/X—another company he already owns— to train the startup’s AI programs. “We will use the public tweets —obviously not anything private— for training as well just like everyone else has,” he said in July.
By using the public tweets as training data, the startup might be able to teach its AI programs to respond with the most up-to-date human language and knowledge. But the plan has encountered resistance and boycotts from some users, who say they never gave Twitter/X explicit permission to use their tweets to train AI programs.
In the meantime, Musk has been warning of AI's potential effects on society in talks this week with podcaster Joe Rogan and British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. “How could AI go wrong?” he told Rogan. “If AI gets programmed by the extinctionists—its utility function will be the extinction of humanity.”