Elon Musk, CEO of both SpaceX and Tesla, has announced the inception of a novel artificial intelligence firm called xAI.
The announcement came to light through a series of tweets on Wednesday.
Musk used Twitter as his platform to declare, “Announcing formation of @xAI to understand reality.”
The company’s vision remains somewhat mysterious, with only a vague description given on their official webpage stating, “The goal of xAI is to understand the true nature of the universe.”
Despite the cryptic announcement, the firm’s Twitter handle, @xAI, commenced its online presence with an intriguing post, “What are the most fundamental unanswered questions?”
xAI’s team, a group of 12, is being spearheaded by Musk.
The team boasts an illustrious lineup of members who have formerly been part of leading tech organizations and research institutes.
As stated on the company’s site, the squad includes former employees of esteemed institutions such as DeepMind, OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research, Tesla, and the University of Toronto.
They carry a rich portfolio, having contributed to some of the most groundbreaking methods in AI.
Key contributions include the development of the Adam optimizer, Batch Normalization, Layer Normalization, and the discovery of adversarial examples.
Their innovative techniques and analyses like Transformer-XL, Autoformalization, the Memorizing Transformer, Batch Size Scaling, and μTransfer are notable.
They have also participated in some of the industry’s major breakthroughs including AlphaStar, AlphaCode, Inception, Minerva, GPT-3.5, and GPT-4.
The announcement on xAI’s webpage also mentions a forthcoming discussion featuring Musk with Reps. Ro Khanna (D-CA) and Mike Gallagher (R-WI).
The event is scheduled on Twitter Spaces at 7 p.m. EST on Wednesday.
Both Khanna and Gallagher are known for their outspoken views on the possible implications, both positive and negative, of artificial intelligence.
The event provides an opportunity for the public to meet the team and pose any questions.
