Elon Musk’s new xAI unit launches to 'understand reality'

xAI, the new AI company founded by Elon Musk, has officially launched with a mission to "understand the true nature of the universe."

The company's website provides some details about its objectives and team members, which include experts from renowned AI organizations such as OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research, and DeepMind.

Led by Elon Musk, the xAI team aims to delve into the depths of reality and unlock the mysteries of the universe. Although specific details of the approach to this task are not available, the team includes prominent AI experts, for instance, Igor Babuschkin, Manuel Kroiss, Yuhuai (Tony) Wu, Christian Szegedy, Jimmy Ba, Toby Pohlen, Ross Nordeen, Kyle Kosic, Greg Yang, Guodong Zhang, and Zihang Dai. The team is also advised by Dan Hendrycks, a respected researcher in AI safety.

To engage with the public and provide insights into their work, the xAI team will be hosting a Twitter Spaces discussion on July 14th. During this interactive session, listeners will have the opportunity to meet the team and ask questions, though the specific time of the event has not been disclosed.

While xAI operates as a separate entity, it maintains close collaboration with Musk's other ventures, including X Corp (Twitter), Tesla, and other companies.

Initial reports about xAI emerged in April, highlighting Musk's involvement and the company's establishment in Nevada. Funding for xAI to get started has reportedly been sought from SpaceX and Tesla.

Musk's previous venture, OpenAI, was co-founded in 2015 but separated from it in 2018 to avoid conflicts of interest with Tesla. Musk has since criticized OpenAI and mentioned his work on a project called "TruthGPT."