(Photo by Graeme Sloan for The Washington Post via Getty Images)
Elon Musk is creating a direct rival to Microsoft through a new company called “Macrohard.”
“It’s a tongue-in-cheek name, but the project is very real!” Musk tweeted on Friday.
The CEO of SpaceX and Tesla plans to take on Microsoft by harnessing AI. Musk describes Macrohard as a “purely AI software company” that’ll be tied to his other startup, xAI.
“In principle, given that software companies like Microsoft do not themselves manufacture any physical hardware, it should be possible to simulate them entirely with AI,” he added.
Musk made the announcement weeks after xAI registered the Macrohard trademark with the US Patent Office. Last month, he also said he was creating a “multi-agent AI software company” that would use xAI's Grok chatbot. (In 2021, he also tweeted: “Macrohard >> Microsoft.”)
The goal is to spawn “hundreds of specialized coding and image/video generation /understanding agents all working together,” he wrote. The same AI agents can then emulate human users “interacting with the software in virtual machines until the result is excellent.”
"This is a macro challenge and a hard problem with stiff competition! Can you guess the name of this company?” he wrote at the time.
So, it sounds like Musk is betting AI can replicate and pump out high-quality software, rivaling the Office programs from Microsoft, a company that's betting heavily on generative AI. Last year, Musk also mentioned his plans to use artificial intelligence to create video games.
To develop Macrohard, Musk seems to be leveraging the growing Colossus supercomputer at xAI’s Memphis facility. According to Musk, xAI will buy millions of Nvidia enterprise-grade GPUs as rival companies, including OpenAI and Meta, do the same in their pursuit of cutting-edge AI.