A few weeks after he signed a letter seeking a pause on big AI experiments, Elon Musk seems to be floating his own AI firm to rival OpenAI.
Elon Musk has joined the bandwagon of billionaires pumping dollars into AI technologies. The 51-year-old has founded a new company, X.AI, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal. Reportedly, the company was incorporated sometime in March based on a Nevada filing accessed by the news outlet.
At present, X.AI has Musk as the director and Jared Birchall as its secretary. Incidentally, Birchall is also the director of the technocrat’s family office. Based on the details in public domain, the company was incorporated on March 9.
Well, off late, several reports have been speculating Musk’s plan to establish an AI company. One of the reports published by The Business Insider also revealed that the billionaire had invested in thousands of GPU processors from Nvidia reportedly to power an upcoming product backed by generative AI.
Meanwhile, another report by The Financial Times suggested that the Tesla chief had plans to create an AI company to rival Sam Altman’s OpenAI which has been backed by Microsoft. For this, it has also been reported that the billionaire sought funding from SpaceX and Tesla investors.
The contradiction
Interestingly, the latest development comes close at heels with a recent open letter seeking a six-month halt on AI developments that was also signed by Elon Musk along with 1000 other dignitaries. Musk, along with other executives, had sought a halt on developing a more powerful AI than GPT-4, citing risks to society.
The development related to Musk’s AI firm comes at a time when Alphabet Inc and Microsoft Corp are scrambling to integrate generative AI technology into their products and services. It also needs to be noted that even as ChatGPT gains wide-ranging use cases, it is also inviting pushback from several nations owing to privacy and a host of other issues.
What will Musk’s firm do?
So far, there has been no information about what Musk will do with his AI company. However, Musk’s opposition to OpenAI’s advancement has been evident for months, and he has spoken about the threat of AI on several occasions.
In one of his earlier interviews to American TV host Tucker Carlson, Musk had said, “AI is more dangerous than, say, mismanaged aircraft design or production maintenance or bad car production.”
According to a report in Financial Times, the Twitter boss has been busy assembling a team of AI researchers and engineers. The high-powered GPUs processors, mentioned earlier, are high-end chips that are required to build large language models (LLM), such as ChatGPT. This is enough fodder for rumour mills to speculate that Musk may be planning something as potent, or even more powerful than, OpenAI’s sensational chatbot.
What Sam Altman said about the open letter
Meanwhile, Sam Altman in response to the open letter co-signed by Musk, said that Open AI was not training GPT-4. He asserted that there was a need to raise the bar for security with regard to LLMs. Altman said that while he agreed with parts of the letter, he felt that it lacked technical nuance. Altman was virtually addressing an event at MIT.
Source:indianexpress.com