On July 12, Musk, the world's most popular technology boss, tweeted to officially announce the birth of a new company, xAI. The official vision of the company, "to understand the nature of the universe," brought the burgeoning tech company to the public's attention immediately. Seemingly a replica of OpenAI, xAI's founding team includes the elite of projects such as AlphaStar, AlphaCode, Inception, Minerva, GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, which seems to indicate that this is a high-profile general artificial intelligence company.
As the latest member of X Group, xAI is Musk's latest move in the AI space after exiting OpenAI and successfully launching Tesla Autopilot and TeslaBot. Amazingly, Musk generously prepared 10,000 GPUs worth about $100 million to meet the development needs of xAI and began to raise more funds for the company.
According to the official website, xAI will work closely with Twitter, Tesla and other companies. As a company with fundamental technological capabilities, xAI has the potential to have a profound impact in areas such as natural language processing, autonomous driving, robotics, and even space exploration.
Musk co-founded x.com with three partners in 1999, and the site later merged into the familiar PayPal. Therefore, Musk has a special emotion for the letter "x", and the naming of xAI seems to reflect his nostalgia for this "first love".
Compared to OpenAI's mission to create AI technology that benefits all mankind, xAI's goal of understanding the nature of the universe is more romantic, which may have something to do with Musk's enthusiasm for Mars exploration in recent years.
Regarding Musk's big plans in xAI, we can find clues in his past with OpenAI. Founded in late 2015, OpenAI started as a non-profit AI research organization. Musk invested $100 million in the early stages and has served as CEO and CTO within the company. But because of concerns that the development of OpenAI will lag far behind companies such as Google, Musk tried to take over OpenAI and take full control of the company's operations, but the board rejected it, and he faded out of OpenAI.
As OpenAI's R&D spending continues to increase, the company began looking to make a profit in 2019. And the biggest investment in its R&D expenditure is computing resources. OpenAI's computing resources and server requirements skyrocketed after GPT-3 caught fire in 2020. At this time, Microsoft has injected billions of dollars into OpenAI and released GPT-3, GPT-4, ChatGPT, DALL-E, whisper and other well-known products.
Musk once ridiculed on Twitter that OpenAI has "become a company controlled by Microsoft, closed in pursuit of profit and profit maximization." And regret that it fell into the hands of a company with a "cruel dictatorship". In this context, the formation of xAI is like another OpenAI that Musk wants to mold.
After Musk's clash of ideas with Sam Altman, the current CEO of OpenAI, he began to pay attention to the possible political bias of ChatGPT and made it clear to his partners that he wanted to build a more realistic AI model — what he called "TruthGPT."
The idea of TruthGPT is very close to that of Geoffrey Hinton, a Turing Award winner and the father of deep learning. He has warned that thanks to breakthroughs in AI-generated technology, the internet will be filled with false photos, videos and text, and ordinary people will no longer be able to tell the real from the fake. TruthGPT is like a hedge against this risk.
Notably, Andrej Karpathy, former Tesla AI senior director, was a research scientist at OpenAI before joining Tesla. During his time at Tesla, he led Autopilot's generation of data-driven algorithmic frameworks. Today, he has returned to OpenAI, and Musk's xAI will undoubtedly attract top talent like him, bringing new breakthroughs to the underlying architecture of FSD.
Musk, 52, now directly oversees six companies: Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter, Neuralink, the Boring company and xAI. The top five companies are all enterprises that are in great need of innovation, and they have to admire his energy. Perhaps OpenAI's biggest competitor is Musk's xAI.