Elon Musk starts AI company after calling for a pause on ‘giant AI experiments’

In an unsurprising addition to the 2023 bingo card, Elon Musk has spun up his very own AI company: X.AI.

According to documents obtained by the Wall Street Journal, the company was incorporated in Nevada on March 9. It lists Musk as its director. Interestingly, this matches the new name for Twitter, Inc, which was recently merged into X Corp.

According to reports, Musk also recently purchased thousands of NVIDIA graphic processing units (GPUs) for use by the company. However, the intended use for the GPUs is yet to be confirmed.

It is currently unclear exactly what X.AI will do or produce. But this move is largely being reported as a challenge to OpenAI, the company behind the wildly popular ChatGPT. Since its launch in November ‘AI’ has been on the lips of most major tech companies, with Google releasing its own ‘Bard’ competitor and Microsoft weaving GPT4 into its Microsoft 360 ecosystem.

Companies such as Canva, Adobe and Salesforce have also announced their own push into AI over the past couple of months.

But an important distinction here is that Musk actually co-founded OpenAI with Y Combinator president Sam Altman. Musk left in 2018, citing a conflict of interest with some of the research being conducted by Tesla. However, despite originally starting as a not-for-profit in AI research, Musk has publicly said that OpenAI changed over the years.

“OpenAI was created as an open source (which is why I named it “Open” AI), non-profit company to serve as a counterweight to Google, but now it has become a closed source, maximum-profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft. Not what I intended at all,” Musk said in a tweet on February 17, 2023.

At the present time, OpenAI has been conducting a pilot program for its paid version of generative AI — ChatGPT Plus.

OpenAI was created as an open source (which is why I named it “Open” AI), non-profit company to serve as a counterweight to Google, but now it has become a closed source, maximum-profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft.

Not what I intended at all.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 17, 2023

Last month Musk signed a letter, along with over 1800 other signatories, that asked for a six-month pause on ‘giant’ AI experiments. The letter itself, published by the Future of Life Institute, has received some scrutiny over some signatures being fake. Some of the researchers whose work was cited in the letter have also reportedly condemned the letter.

X.AI is the sixth company that Elon Musk owns, alongside Tesla, Neuralink, The Boring Company, SpaceX and Twitter.