Elon Musk, the CEO of both Twitter and Tesla, appears to have established a new venture, which might be focused on artificial intelligence (AI).
According to a report by Mike Dalton for CryptoSlate, per a recently publicized company filing, Musk is leading a new enterprise named X.AI, with his associate Jared Birchall acting as secretary. Apparently, the filing also reveals that X.AI is incorporated in Nevada and has $100,000 in capital.
While the document doesn’t offer additional details about the company’s staff or objectives, the name itself suggests an AI focus. The letter “X” is a recurring theme in Musk’s businesses.
As Dalton correctly points out, Twitter Inc. was recently rebranded to X Corp., which X Holding Corp. owns. This development aligns with Musk’s vision of creating an all-encompassing app called X, merging social networking and payment features. As mentioned by CryptoSlate, Musk’s connection to the letter “X” goes back to his early financial firm, X.com, which later became PayPal in 2000.
Musk has a strong presence in the AI industry, having co-founded OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, in 2015 before leaving in 2018. Dalton says that Musk reportedly recruited Igor Babuschkin, a former Google Deepmind AI team member, back in February to develop an alternative to ChatGPT.
Despite his enthusiasm for AI, Musk is among a group of experts who have signed an open letter recommending temporary restrictions on AI training to address potential risks and guarantee “a long AI summer.”
As you may remember, the open letter was published by the Future of Life Institute on March 29, and it was titled “Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter.” It called for a temporary halt to developing powerful AI systems like GPT-4, sparking a debate within the tech community.
The open letter stated, “Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable.” The authors called for a public and verifiable pause of at least six months on training AI systems more powerful than GPT-4. They also urged AI labs to develop shared safety protocols to ensure AI systems’ safe design and development.
Currently, there is no indication that Musk’s AI projects will involve cryptocurrency. On March 3, Musk hinted at favoring AI over cryptocurrency, but the sincerity of this remark is unclear.
Musk has not publicly commented on the establishment of the new company.
