When we first talked about this artificial intelligence company, what we pointed out is that the company was composed solely of men. Elon Musk had forgotten to hire women.
The AI startup, which Musk announced in July, aims to “understand the true nature of the universe,” according to its website, and Elon Musk appears to be preparing it to compete with companies like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, which are behind leading chatbots like ChatGPT, Bard, and Claude.
A fortunate few will know what xAI is.
“Tomorrow, xAI will unveil its first AI to a select group,” Elon Musk tweeted. “In some key aspects, it’s the best there is right now.”
It appears that Elon Musk acquired thousands of high-powered Nvidia GPU processors in the spring, the type of chips needed to build a large language model similar to tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Bard.
Musk shared details of his plans for a new AI tool called TruthGPT in April, during a recorded interview on the Fox News Channel, expressing concerns that existing AI companies were prioritizing “politically correct” systems.
According to Greg Yang, co-founder of xAI, the startup will delve into the “mathematics of deep learning,” a facet of AI, and “develop the ‘theory of everything’ for large neural networks” in order to take AI “to the next level.”
The startup’s advisor is Dan Hendrycks, CEO of the Center for AI Safety, a non-profit organization based in San Francisco. In May, this organization published a letter signed by tech leaders, stating that “mitigating the risk of AI extinction should be a global priority alongside other risks on a societal scale, such as pandemics and nuclear war.”
The letter faced backlash from many members of the tech community, including academics and ethics experts, who believe that focusing too much on the threats of AI in an unspecified future distracts from the real harms that algorithms are causing to marginalized communities right now.
