Musk formed xAI company to "understand the true nature of the universe", with members from well-known AI institutions

Source: The Paper

Reporter Fang Xiao

·Team members have worked at other well-known companies in the field of artificial intelligence, including OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research, and DeepMind, which was recently merged into Google. There are also top scholars in the field of AI from the University of Toronto.

According to the xAI website, the company is “independent” from Musk’s X Corp, “but will work closely with X (Twitter), Tesla and others.”

Tesla founder Musk tweeted: Announcing the formation of @xAI to understand reality.

Tesla founder Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company finally has definite information.

On July 12, local time, Musk’s newly established artificial intelligence company xAI launched a new website (detailing its mission and team. Musk said on Twitter that the company’s purpose is to “understand reality.”

“The goal of xAI is to understand the true nature of the universe,” the website says.

Logo and slogan of xAI company.

The team is led by Musk, and members of the team have worked at other well-known companies in the field of artificial intelligence, including OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research and DeepMind, which was recently merged into Google. In addition to Musk, the site also lists Igor Babuschkin, Manuel Kroiss, Yuhuai (Tony) Wu, Christian Szegedy, Jimmy Ba, Toby Pohlen, Ross Nordeen, Kyle Kosic, Greg Yang, Guodong Zhu and Zihang Dai.

The xAI official website lists the important members of the company.

Among them, Guodong Zhu and Jimmy Ba are scholars from the University of Toronto. Ba is an assistant professor of artificial intelligence pioneer Geoffrey Hinton (Geoffrey Hinton), who co-authored a deep learning optimization paper with Diederik Kingma in 2014 — — “Adam” papers. It is the most-cited paper in the field of artificial intelligence at 95,460, according to the science website ResearchGate. Ba “has a unique brain” and “has a lot of originality in his approach compared to his peers,” said De D Pandya, director of artificial intelligence engineering at the Vector Institute, where Ba was a researcher.

The xAI team is currently advised by Dan Hendrycks, director of the Center for Artificial Intelligence Safety, a nonprofit that aims to “reduce risks at the societal scale associated with artificial intelligence.” This spring, it published a warning letter signed by the CEOs of several leading artificial intelligence companies, including DeepMind and OpenAI.

The @xAI team will host a Twitter Spaces discussion on July 14, where listeners can “meet the team and ask us questions,” the site says, without giving a specific time.

According to the xAI website, the company is “independent” of Musk’s X Corp, “but will work closely with X (Twitter), Tesla and others.” Musk recently imposed a strict but temporary read on Twitter , blaming the change on AI startups scraping training data for large language models.

Despite Musk’s frequent criticism of San Francisco, the xAI website says the company is “actively recruiting experienced engineers and researchers” to work in the “Bay Area.” So far, most AI development has been concentrated in Silicon Valley.

In April, documents emerged showing that Musk founded xAI in Nevada. At the time, Musk was listed as a director and Jared Birchall, director of the Musk family office, was listed as secretary. Little was known about xAI at the time, but reports suggested that Musk had sought funding from SpaceX and Tesla to get the project off the ground.

Musk co-founded OpenAI, ChatGPT’s development arm, in 2015 but left the organization in 2018. Despite his commitment to the field of artificial intelligence, he expressed deep concerns about the technology. In March, he became one of tech leaders calling for a moratorium on the training of powerful AI models. He has also publicly criticized OpenAI and revealed that he is working on building something called “TruthGPT (truth GPT)”.