In April, Elon Musk informed right-wing commentator Tucker Carlson that he was starting a project to compete with ChatGPT and construct “a maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe.”

Today, Musk unveiled that new synthetic intelligence enterprise. It’s known as xAI. The firm’s spare touchdown web page repeats that purpose of understanding the universe and lists 11 AI researchers—seemingly all males—who’ve made vital contributions to the sector of AI lately and labored at firms together with Google, DeepMind, and OpenAI.

The crew is an “all-star founding team,” in keeping with Linxi “Jim” Fan, an AI researcher at Nvidia. “I’m really impressed by the talent density—read too many papers by them to count,” he writes in a LinkedIn post.

One of the corporate’s cofounders, Greg Wang, said in a tweet that xAI goals to take AI to the subsequent stage by growing a mathematical “‘theory of everything’ for large neural networks,” the machine studying expertise that has dominated AI for the previous decade. “This AI will enable everyone to understand our mathematical universe in ways unimaginable before,” he wrote.

Like many different new AI projects, Musk’s is motivated by concern and maybe some FOMO over the speedy rise of ChatGPT. He has talked of xAI as a response to the bot, which he has suggested has political biases, and criticized its creator, startup OpenAI, for being secretive and too cozy with its backer Microsoft.

Musk’s ailing feeling is maybe compounded by the truth that he cofounded OpenAI in 2015, however three years later severed ties with what was then a nonprofit, after reportedly failing to take full management. (The firm turned a for-profit enterprise in 2019.) And Musk has lately joined these warning that AI might pose an existential threat to humanity and entrench the power of giants like Microsoft and Google. 

Musk isn’t any stranger to creating daring bets, however what little has been revealed of xAI’s targets sounds slightly odd. ChatGPT and its rivals corresponding to Google’s Bard are constructed on deep studying, and OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman has stated wholly new ideas are needed to push beyond existing systems. Researching the basics of the expertise might assist discover them.

But a lot of the current progress in AI has come from making present methods larger and throwing extra compute energy and information at them. And the sweeping adjustments AI is anticipated to ship in tech and different industries over the subsequent few years will come from deploying that mostly-mature expertise.

At this stage, xAI appears more likely to lack the cloud computing energy wanted to match OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google. And its comparatively small group of AI researchers doesn’t look world-beating in comparison with the lots of that every of these established corporations can deploy on AI initiatives. The solely individual concerned who has a historical past of engaged on AI dangers is xAI’s sole named advisor, Dan Hendrycks, who’s director of the nonprofit Center for AI Safety and coordinated a recent public statement from tech leaders about the existential threat AI may pose.

Although his supposedly giant-killing AI venture is beginning small, Musk does, in fact, have some vital sources to attract on. The new firm will work carefully with Twitter and Tesla, in keeping with the xAI web site. Twitter’s information from conversations on the platform is properly suited to coaching massive language fashions like that behind ChatGPT, and Tesla now designs its own specialized AI chips and has vital expertise constructing massive computing clusters for AI, which could possibly be used to spice up xAI’s cloud computing energy. Tesla can also be building a humanoid robot, a venture that could possibly be helped by, and be useful to, xAI in future.

But maybe at this early stage, xAI’s reality-bending rhetoric is primarily about attracting expertise. AI experience has by no means been in larger demand. The most urgent downside for a brand new entrant, even one backed by Musk’s popularity and deep pockets, is to indicate it will probably appeal to the researchers wanted to finally change into aggressive.

The big targets Musk has set for himself—difficult present AI giants and defending humanity from dangerous AI—make his tiny new AI firm look even smaller. Many AI researchers who’re additionally involved concerning the trajectory of AI appear to view the issue as one which requires larger transparency and collaboration, somewhat than a lone genius with a small band of all-stars.