Elon Musk has made another bold move to take on the artificial intelligence (AI) industry. The billionaire has announced setting up a company called xAI, which will try to “understand reality,” according to his tweet.
The company has a website where it explains its purpose but only provides a few other details, reports the BBC. However, it says the founder will run the firm separately from his other companies, including Twitter. It also states that it will work with the likes of X Corp and Tesla to make progress toward its goal.
According to the site, xAI will have 12 employees and is staffed by veterans of DeepMind, OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research, and Tesla, as well as the University of Toronto. It will also be advised by Dan Hendricks, the director of the Center for AI Safety, a nonprofit that has warned about existential threats from superintelligent machines.
The xAI website also says the company would use advanced machine learning to understand the universe’s workings. It claims that its research into consciousness, physics, and life’s biggest questions will help humans better grasp the nature of the world around us. It also mentions that the firm isn’t attempting to build AI that will “eliminate or constrain humanity.”
It needs to be clarified what the specifics of xAI’s technology will be. Still, the website suggests it is likely to focus on applying deep reinforcement learning to complex problems. This technique allows an AI to learn from examples rather than being programmed with rules. It is thought that xAI will have a presence in Austin, where many other companies Musk runs are based. These include Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, and The Boring Company.
Earlier this year, Musk said he was building an AI that could “outperform a human at any task,” and that superintelligence would arrive in five or six years. But he has also expressed concerns about the potential dangers of AI, saying that it could be used for evil or to oppress people. He has even signed a letter calling for an industrywide pause on developing more powerful AI systems.
