Elon Musk enters the artificial intelligence race. He does it with a startup to which he has given the name he cares most about: X.Ai. X, as the name of his first fintech company. X ome SpaceX. Like XCorp, the new name of Twitter started the revolution to become a “superapp” on the WeChat model. Like X, the name given to the youngest of his seven children. X.Ai is the answer (the challenge) to OpenAi.
He founded both, but slipped away from the latter after breaking up with his former travel companions. It seems precisely for reasons related to the type of artificial intelligence to be developed. Shortly after Musk’s release, OpenAi from foundation became a full-fledged company, with “multi-billion” investments from Microsoft.
X.Ai: 10,000 boards, based in Nevada, engineers from DeepMind
On the other hand, too many details are known about X.Ai at the moment. It was founded in March in Nevada (where Twitter also moved its headquarters last week). And it will start with a budget of 10,000 graphics cards. The engine of the software that will give life to its artificial intelligence. Elon Musk has been working on launching this entrepreneurial challenge since February, as revealed by the Financial Times.
He probably did so in the weeks in which he signed a letter with 1,800 other entrepreneurs and academics asking for a halt to the development of more advanced and potentially dangerous artificial intelligences for the fate of humanity. A timing that arouses some suspicion. In the prodigious acceleration of this technology, which from December to today has monopolized the debate on the new frontiers of innovation, obscuring the marketing of social networks and that of the metaverse, Musk has taken different, sometimes contradictory positions, which did not suggest a clear strategy .
ChatGpt and Ai become a billionaire business
The fears expressed in the letter in which he asked for a halt to the development of new, more powerful AIs – “Do we really have to develop non-human minds that could surpass us in intelligence and replace us?”, he wrote – have given way to an entrepreneurial vision that sees where the Ai is a way to make money. Much money.
Because it is clear that it has the potential to become a tool capable of changing work, production, industry itself as it has been understood up to now. To make the company effective and profitable as soon as possible, Musk would have hired Igor Babuschkin e Manuel Cross, both from DeepMind, the AI arm of Alphabet (Google’s parent company). They drive it, 10,000 graphics cards the engine. Jared Birchall, a former banker for Morgan Stanley, to manage the company’s coffers. Less fears, more attention to profits in a sector in which Musk wants to be second to none.
The accusation against OpenAi: a leftist artificial intelligence
Certainly not second to Sam Altman. She founded OpenAi with him in 2015, before leaving the company in 2018. She has harshly criticized the company in recent months. A tweet last December accused OpenAi of training its algorithms in such a way as to have a “woke” approach, a term used to indicate a certain US liberal left.
In essence, the charge against Altman’s AI is that she was trained with leftist bias. And that it could be a dangerous source of disinformation. Musk, who on the contrary has openly supported the American right in recent years, sometimes even in a controversial way, for some he would also have in mind a ‘political’ response to OpenAi.
Musk’s new startup, if successful, will become another player in the race between technology companies to develop more powerful artificial intelligence models. Which have proven to be able to score resounding successes, and attract billions of investments. Earlier this year OpenAI released GPT-4, an AI model designed to mimic human reading and writing. With sometimes surprising results.