After months of teasing, billionaire ai elon musk website officially launched his new artificial intelligence company Wednesday. The company is called xAI and will aim to “understand reality,” according to the spare website. The company will employ a team of engineers who previously worked with companies like OpenAI, Deep Mind and Google Research (which has since been folded into Google’s parent company Alphabet).
The site also promotes an upcoming Twitter Spaces chat featuring the xAI team where listeners can ask questions. A number of the xAI employees also have affiliate badges on their Twitter accounts.
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xAI’s launch comes as the world’s tech giants are racing to develop generative AI software. Musk has made mixed comments about the technology, saying it could either save or destroy humanity, and he has signed a letter calling for an industrywide pause in AI development.
One of the xAI staffers appears to be Dan Hendricks, a renowned expert in AI safety. He’ll advise xAI and help train the team on how to prevent bias in their work. Hendrycks’s appointment may signal that the company is trying to address concerns about sexism and racism in machine learning, which have popped up as AI-based systems have disproportionately flagged black people for future crimes and favored white and male job applicants.
It’s unclear how much funding the xAI has or what specific kinds of AI it will focus on. But it’s a return to the field for Musk, who has publicly criticized the development of AI and called for regulation.
