The Twitter boss had in the past positioned himself against the ChatGPT AI, which he considered “woke”.
Elon Musk founded a new company in March specializing in artificial intelligence (AI), called X.AI and based in Nevada, according to an official document consulted by AFP on the register of companies registered in this American state. .
According to an article released on Friday by Financial Times (FT), the new entity must compete with OpenAI, the Californian start-up that designed ChatGPT, a generative AI program capable of interacting with humans and producing all kinds of text on demand.
Google alumni
The success of this interface since its release at the end of November has launched a real race for this high-potential technology. Since the end of February, various specialized media have reported that Elon Musk is investing in this area.
According to their anonymous sources, he recently recruited Igor Babuschkin and Manuel Kroiss, both of whom worked for DeepMind, the AI branch of Alphabet (parent company of Google).
He is also said to have purchased some 10,000 graphics processors – computers needed to train language models, the foundation of generative AI systems. The entrepreneur, however, signed a call last month to take a break from research on next-generation AI.
The hundreds of signatories evoke various risks related to this technology, and wonder in these terms: “Is it desirable to develop non-human minds which could ultimately exceed us in number and intelligence, and replace us?”.
Musk vs. “woke” AIs
Elon Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015, before leaving the company in 2018. He has since criticized the company, notably saying in a tweet last December that it trains AI to be “woke” (a term designating a fringe of the American left), that is, to “lie”.
X.AI’s official registration document, dated March 9, 2023, lists a single director, Elon Musk, and a secretary, Jared Birchall – an ex-Morgan Stanley banker who manages the multibillionaire’s fortune, according to the FT.
“X” is a mathematical symbol that the boss of Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter and Neuralink is particularly fond of.
Before the acquisition of Twitter, he made cryptic allusions to “X”, his vision of an all-purpose application (messaging, social network, financial services, etc.), like WeChat in China.
He recently changed the name of Twitter to “X Corp”, and the headquarters of the social network is no longer in Delaware (where most American companies are located) but in Nevada. It is found in the first name of one of his children, a boy baptized X Æ A- 12.
