Elon Musk unveils new company xAI to 'understand true nature of universe'

Tesla CEO Elon Musk on Wednesday announced the launch of a new artificial intelligence company, xAI.

The company is established with the goal to "understand the true nature of the universe". 

According to the company's website, Musk will share more information on the company in a live Twitter Spaces chat on Friday.

During a Twitter Spaces event on Thursday, Musk talked about this plan to build a safer AI.

Rather than relying on explicit programming of morality, xAI aims to create a "maximally curious" AI. 

Musk said that by encouraging AI to understand the true nature of the universe, it would prioritise pro-humanity actions. 

"If it tried to understand the true nature of the universe, that's actually the best thing that I can come up with from an AI safety standpoint. I think it is going to be pro-humanity from the standpoint that humanity is just much more interesting than not-humanity," Musk said.

With xAI, Musk aims to compete with companies such as OpenAI, Google and Anthropic, which are behind leading chatbots like ChatGPT, Bard and Claude.

News of the start-up first surfaced in April, with reports that Musk had secured thousands of GPU processors from Nvidia, an American multinational company, in order to power a potential large language model. 

One of the AI start-up's advisors will be Dan Hendrycks, executive director of the Center for AI Safety. This San Francisco-based non-profit published a letter in May this year stating that "mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war".

Greg Yang, co-founder of xAI, said the start-up would delve into the "mathematics of deep learning", a facet of AI, and "develop the 'theory of everything' for large neural networks" to take AI "to the next level".

Musk incorporated xAI in Nevada in March this year. Previously, he had changed the name of Twitter to "X Corp." but on xAI's website, the company notes its separation from X Corp., adding that it will "work closely with X (Twitter), Tesla, and other companies to make progress towards our mission".

While Musk was a co-founder of OpenAI, the company responsible for ChatGPT, he stepped down in 2018. 

Musk has assembled a team for xAI that includes engineers with experience at prominent tech companies. The team members include Igor Babuschkin, formerly of Google's DeepMind; Tony Wu, a former Google employee; Christian Szegedy, a research scientist at Google; and Greg Yang, who previously worked at Microsoft.