Elon Musk has made official his plan to develop artificial intelligence that will be an alternative to the ChatGPT chatbot. The billionaire entrepreneur has announced the creation of xAI, a company with the mission of "understanding the true nature of the universe."
The xAI team brings together big names in the AI market
On the official xAI website, published this week, the company listed those who make up its initial team. And the group already includes executives who have worked in some of the main companies and projects aimed at developing artificial intelligence. The page reads:
Our team is led by Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX. Previously, we worked at DeepMind, OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research, Tesla, and the University of Toronto. Collectively, we have contributed to some of the most widely used methods in this field, notably the Adam optimizer, batch normalization, layered normalization, and adversarial example discovery. Additionally, we have introduced innovative techniques and analysis, such as Transformer-XL, Autoformalization, Memorizing Transformer, Batch Size Scaling, and μTransfer. We have worked on and led the development of some of the biggest innovations in this field, such as AlphaStar, AlphaCode, Inception, Minerva, GPT-3.5 and GPT-4.
With vacant positions for engineers and researchers, the team now has 12 high-level professionals. Most of them have worked in Google's artificial intelligence unit, DeepMind, or in a related position. Two of Musk's new employees, Guodong Zhang and Jimmy Ba, are academics at the University of Toronto.
Ba even studied under AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton and co-authored the acclaimed paper “Adam” with Diederik Kingma. Research on optimization in deep learning is the most cited article in works on artificial intelligence.
The existential dangers of AI are the order of the day
For those who don't know or don't remember, Elon Musk was one of those involved in the creation of OpenAI, the artificial intelligence start-up responsible for the development of the popular ChatGPT. However, he left the company's board of directors in 2018 and has since publicly criticized OpenAi, especially following the creation of a for-profit arm within the company.
But it's not just OpenAi that Musk has reservations about. The businessman has shown his concern about the development of technology on other occasions. Musk was even part of a group of tech industry leaders and researchers who, as recently as March of this year, called for a halt to the training of powerful AI models.
And this concern should also be present in xAI's work. The newly launched website states that the company will have the advice of Dan Hendrycks, director of the Center for AI Safety. The group focused on safe AI development published a warning letter in the second quarter of this year. The warning focuses on the existential dangers of the rapid development of AI. The document was signed by the CEOs of some of the leading AI companies, including DeepMind and Alphabet Inc.'s OpenAI.
Concern or business tactic?
In an interview with Bloomberg, Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn and the startup Inflection AI, stated that Elon Musk was one of the great entrepreneurs of our time. For him, Musk has the necessary credentials to advance the development of technology.
However, he criticized Musk's request to pause the development of artificial intelligence. He criticized the fact that Musk signed the document about the pause before launching xAi. "I find it a little suspicious to sign a six-month pause while you're trying to accelerate your own efforts," Hoffman said.
There is still no more information about launches and dates for Musk's new company. xAi's official website says it should share more information in the coming weeks and months.
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