Billionaire Elon Musk on Wednesday announced that he has formed a new artificial intelligence （AI） company, xAI, which has employed researchers from Google, OpenAI and other top technology companies. The goal, Musk tweeted, is"to understand reality."
Musk isn't a novice to AI given that Tesla uses the technology in its cars. While xAI didn't mention what projects it will be working on, the company noted that its team of 11 researchers are drawn from top tech companies such as Microsoft Research, OpenAI and Google.
Musk suggested that the reason he picked July 12, 2023, to announce the start of xAI is connected with a science fiction classic, Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. In his tweet, he noted that adding the date 7-12-23 equals 42, which the work of the fiction famously assumes is the answer to life.
The company said it will be advised by Dan Hendrycks, director of the Center for AI Safety. Hendrycks pointed out where AI could cause problems. "AIs could be used by bad people to make new deadly bioweapons," Hendrycks said in May. "Or people could make AI that tries to hurt people on purpose. If this AI was really smart, it could be a big danger to all of us."
The first time xAI was shown to the public was after Musk talked about it in April to the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson. Musk told Carlson that OpenAI's ChatGPT was a bit restricted and that he wanted to create a different tool that would be a super honest AI that tries to learn how everything in the world works.
The startup reflected Musk's long-voiced concerns about a future in which AI systems could present an existential risk to humanity. Musk said the idea is that an AI that wants to understand humanity is less likely to des troy it.
