SAN FRANCISCO — Elon Musk on Wednesday announced the formation of a new company focused on artificial intelligence, after months of teasing plans to build a ChatGPT rival.
The company is called xAI launched a website and a team of a dozen staff. The new company will be led by Musk, according to the website, and “will work closely with X (Twitter), Tesla and other companies to make progress towards our mission.”
The videos in the media player above are not associated with the current story. That ABC7 News Bay Area streaming channel 24/7 lets you view the news all day long.
“The goal of xAI is to understand the true nature of the universe,” the website says, echoing the language Musk has previously used to describe his AI ambitions.
Musk was an early supporter of OpenAI creator ChatGPT, but later criticized the company for including safeguards aimed at preventing viral chatbots from spewing biased or sexist responses.
“The dangers of training an AI to wake – in other words, lie – are deadly,” Musk tweeted in December, responding to a Twitter user who asked the CEO of OpenAI if it was possible to “turn off the wake setting” in ChatGPT.
In an interview with Fox News host Tucker Carlson in April, Musk said he was teasing plans for his new AI venture. “We're going to start something I call TruthGPT,” he said, describing it as a “maximum truth-seeking AI” that “cares about understanding the universe.”
Musk's announcement of the new company comes months after he warned in an interview that he thought AI could lead to “the collapse of civilization” and joined other technology leaders in calling for a pause in the “out of control” AI race.
Some more details on the company's mission will be available soon, but the website indicates they are actively recruiting staff. Currently, a dozen staff at the website appear to be male.
Musk's latest venture announcement comes at a crucial time for Musk.
Twitter, the company it acquired for $44 billion in October, is now facing an uncertain future after Meta launched a rival app called Threads. The Meta app surpassed 100 million registrations in less than a week. Meanwhile, there have been many reports of a decline in Twitter usage.
The turmoil on Twitter comes after months of Musk alienating some users and advertisers by cutting staff, pushing through controversial policy changes and making a number of inflammatory comments.
In addition to Twitter, Musk runs several other companies, including Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink and The Boring Company.
The-CNN-Wire & 2023 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.