Elon Musk’s new company xAI will focus on understanding the nature of the universe and roll out models that aren’t trained to be politically correct.
xAI, a company that will aim to “understand the true nature of the universe” was announced to be formed. More information will be shared over the next couple of weeks and months. The team is led by Elon Musk and other experts in the field including those from DeepMind, OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research, Tesla, and the University of Toronto.
You can learn more about the people involved and the projects they have worked on or led on the official website.
In an episode on Twitter Spaces (recording here—Close to 2 hours long), Musk highlighted that the new company will focus on prioritizing transparent truth over political correctness (like ChatGPT dumbing things down to avoid controversial responses in its output) and how competition keeps companies honest. This could be a sign that the company might be releasing a ChatGPT/Bard competitor where the model will be allowed to share its beliefs, even if they venture into the controversial side of the spectrum.
But more importantly, the company will focus on tackling unsolved scientific mysteries such as dark matter, the nature of gravitation, and alien life.
When asked if he was building a truth-speaking variant of ChatGPT, Musk replied “I do think there is a significant danger in training AI to be politically correct. Or in other words, training AI basically to not say what it actually thinks is true.”
The website invites people to join the team by filling out a form.
Notably, xAI is different from X, which is the company that Twitter was merged/transformed into (Twitter, Inc. is now X Corp. – TechCrunch). With this, Elon Musk has his sixth company under his direct leadership after Tesla, SpaceX, X (Twitter), Neuralink, and The Boring Company.
Formerly, the domain (x.ai) was for a website that offered a personal assistant to schedule meetings, in operation since 2014, as per Wayback Machine snapshots.
