Elon Musk’s new AI company aims ‘to understand the true nature of the universe’

Elon Musk has a new AI company. A website has appeared for xAI, which will embark on the self-described mission to “understand the true nature of the universe.” The announcement comes after filing documents revealed the existence of a company called “X.AI Corp” earlier this year. Musk also said in an April interview that he wanted to start a venture for “maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe” that “hopefully does more good than harm.”

Not much else is known yet about Musk’s latest venture. The Tesla and SpaceX CEO and Twitter Chairman tweeted today, “Announcing formation of @xAI to understand reality.” The company webpage notes that the team will host a Twitter Spaces chat on Friday, July 14th.

Musk’s previous comments about an AI startup suggested he wanted “a third option” to challenge ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and Google. He reportedly bought thousands of GPUs earlier this year for a Twitter-related AI project. It isn’t yet clear whether the two projects are related.

The website lists veterans of DeepMind, OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research, Tesla and the University of Toronto as working on the project. “Collectively we contributed some of the most widely used methods in the field, in particular the Adam optimizer, Batch Normalization, Layer Normalization, and the discovery of adversarial examples,” the xAI website reads. “We further introduced innovative techniques and analyses such as Transformer-XL, Autoformalization, the Memorizing Transformer, Batch Size Scaling, and μTransfer. We have worked on and led the development of some of the largest breakthroughs in the field including AlphaStar, AlphaCode, Inception, Minerva, GPT-3.5, and GPT-4.”

In addition to Musk, the listed team members include Igor Babuschkin, Manuel Kroiss, Yuhuai (Tony) Wu, Christian Szegedy, Jimmy Ba, Toby Pohlen, Ross Nordeen, Kyle Kosic, Greg Yang, Guodong Zhang and Zihang Dai.