Billionaire Elon Musk founded a new company specializing in artificial intelligence (AI), called X.AI and based in Nevada, in March, according to an official document consulted by Agence France-Presse on the register of companies. registered in that U.S. state.
According to an article published Friday April 14 by the Financial Times (FT), the new entity must compete with OpenAI, the Californian start-up which designed ChatGPT, a generative AI program capable of interacting with humans and produce all kinds of texts on demand. The success of this interface since its release at the end of November has launched a real race for this high-potential technology.
Since the end of February, various specialized media have reported that Elon Musk is investing in this area. According to their anonymous sources, he recently recruited Igor Babuschkin and Manuel Kroiss, both of whom went through DeepMind, the AI ??branch of Alphabet (parent company of Google). He would also have bought some 10,000 graphics processing units (GPUs), necessary to train language models, that is to say the foundation of generative AI systems.
An empire under the sign of the X
The entrepreneur, however, signed a call last month to take a break from research on next-generation AI. The hundreds of signatories refer to various risks associated with this technology, and ask themselves in these terms: “Is it desirable to develop non-human minds that could ultimately outnumber and outwit us, and replace us? “.
Elon Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015, before leaving the company in 2018. He has since criticized the company, notably saying in a tweet last December that it trains AI to “woke” say to “lie”.
X.AI’s official registration document, dated March 9, 2023, lists a single director, Elon Musk, and a secretary, Jared Birchall — a former Morgan Stanley banker who manages the multibillionaire’s fortune, according to the FT. “X” is a mathematical symbol that the boss of Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter and Neuralink is particularly fond of.
Prior to the Twitter acquisition, he made cryptic allusions to “X”, his vision of an all-purpose application (messaging, social network, financial services…), like WeChat in China. He recently changed the name of Twitter to “X Corp”, and the social network’s headquarters are no longer in Delaware (where most American companies are located) but in Nevada. It is found in the first name of one of his children, a boy baptized X Æ A- 12.