Elon Musk Announces xAI to ‘Understand Reality’

The formation of a new venture, xAI, was announced today by Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. The venture aims to dive into the very essence of the universe, exploring its mysteries with a team of leading tech researchers.

The leading minds behind xAI include Musk, and other luminaries who have previously contributed to organizations like DeepMind, OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research, Tesla, and the University of Toronto.

These innovators have collectively developed some of the most widely used methodologies in the field, including the Adam optimizer, Batch Normalization, Layer Normalization, and the discovery of adversarial examples.

Their work has led to the development of breakthrough techniques and analyses such as Transformer-XL, Autoformalization, the Memorizing Transformer, Batch Size Scaling, and μTransfer. They have also been pivotal in the development of significant breakthroughs in the field including AlphaStar, AlphaCode, Inception, Minerva, GPT-3.5, and GPT-4.

The advisory team for xAI is led by Dan Hendrycks, current director of the Center for AI Safety.

Despite being a separate entity from X Corp, xAI will maintain close working relationships with X (Twitter), Tesla, and other relevant companies to further progress towards their mission.

The first tweet from xAI on Wednesday was, “What are the most fundamental unanswered questions?”. The xAI logo incorporate the ‘X’ from SpaceX to make up its ‘A’ and ‘I’.

And what are the most fundamental unknown questions?

Once you know the right question to ask, the answer is often the easy part, as my hero, Douglas Adams, would say. pic.twitter.com/Bo6v8E1Ooq

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 12, 2023

The xAI team will host a Twitter Spaces chat on Friday, July 14th, where people will have the chance to meet the team and ask questions.

As part of its growth strategy, xAI is actively recruiting experienced engineers and researchers to join its technical staff in the Bay Area. Interested parties are encouraged to apply via its website.

Back in April, filings in Nevada revealed Musk had registered X.AI Corp., with the apparent goal of creating a rival lab to OpenAI.