Elon Musk, Twitter’s not-so-benevolent CEO, today announced the launch of a new organization, xAI, to “understand the true nature of the universe.”
Ambitious? A little. So how does xAI plan to achieve it? More details will be announced during a Twitter Spaces on Friday, apparently. But xAI’s splash page reveals that the team — 12 people strong, currently — will be led by Musk and veterans of DeepMind, OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research, Tesla and the University of Toronto.
xAI’s namesake is X Corp., the name assigned to Twitter since early April, along with the “X” label Musk has applied to his vision of an “everything app.”
xAI will be advised by Dan Hendrycks, the director at the Center for AI Safety, an AI research nonprofit. And it’ll work with Twitter and one of Musk’s other companies, Tesla, to “make progress towards [its] mission” — whatever that mission ends up being.
While Musk’s saving the juicy tidbits for Friday, xAI’s roster gives some clues as to what the organization’s work might entail. Many of the founding members specialize in large language models along the lines of OpenAI’s GPT-4 or have experience in techniques like reinforcement learning, which teaches AI models to accomplish tasks by rewarding them for performing those tasks.
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