Elon Musk launches his own xAI biz 'to understand reality'
(2023/07/12)
- Reference: 1689188151
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2023/07/12/musk_xai_reality/
- Source link:
Elon Musk is founding of his own AI company with some lofty ambitions. According to the billionaire, his xAI venture is being formed "to understand reality."
Those hoping to get a better explanation than Musk's brief [1]tweet by visiting xAI's [2]website won't find much to help them understand what the company actually plans to do there, either.
"The goal of xAI is to understand the true nature of the universe," xAI said of itself, adding more would be explained in a Twitter Spaces chat to be held Friday, July 14.
[3]
We've known Musk had his own ambitions for an AI platform for some time. The earliest indications that the Twitter CEO was planning to take his AI ball and go home to build his own version of that technology, too, came in [4]March when news came out His Muskiness was seeking developers for the project.
[5]
[6]
It was at that point that Deepmind and OpenAI engineer Igor Babuschkin was rumored to have joined the project, a fact that was confirmed by Babuschkin's name on xAI's site listing him right after Elon Musk.
Musk has been looking into build his own " [7]anti-woke " chatbot that wouldn't, to his mind, be biased in favor of the political left. Babuschkin [8]previously told The Information that Musk was less focused on removing restrictions from AI chatbots and more driven to improve their reasoning and penchant to [9]fabricate the truth.
[10]Elon Musk yearns for AI devs to build 'anti-woke' rival ChatGPT bot
[11]Google says public data is fair game for training its AIs
[12]Here's how Microsoft hopes to inject ChatGPT into all your apps and bots via Azure
[13]From cage fight to page fight: Twitter threatens to sue Meta after Threads app launch
The Financial Times [14]reported in April that Musk had incorporated a company called xAI, per Nevada business records, which showed the serial CEO as the company's only director. Musk's personal money manager, Jared Birchall, is listed as secretary for the firm.
The FT said sources with knowledge of the move were aware that Musk had bought up "thousands of high-powered GPU processors from Nvidia," common components in the construction and operation of other large language model AIs, around the same timeframe.
[15]
Along with employing Musk, Birchall, Babuschkin and their roles, xAI employees listed on the fledgling company's website have worked for companies including Google and Microsoft research, Tesla and as academics at the University of Toronto. Names listed include [16]Tony Wu , [17]Christian Szegedy and Toby Pohlen, and others, each with several years of experience in AI and roles at various, often overlapping, companies.
[18]Dan Hendrycks , director of the Center for AI Safety, is listed as an advisor for the team. We reached out to Hendrycks and CAIS to see if they could share more details about xAI, but didn't immediately hear back.
Until then, expect hyperbole to be the rule of the day. "What are the most fundamental unanswered questions?" That's what xAI [19]tweeted in its first public statement. ®
Get our [20]Tech Resources
[1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1679164661869182976
[2] https://x.ai/
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2ZK8ihoD4kp@FpBt45W09bgAAAMA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[4] https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/06/ai_roundup/
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZK8ihoD4kp@FpBt45W09bgAAAMA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33ZK8ihoD4kp@FpBt45W09bgAAAMA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/06/ai_roundup/
[8] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/fighting-woke-ai-musk-recruits-team-to-develop-openai-rival
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/11/ai_models_supply_chain/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/06/ai_roundup/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/06/google_ai_models_internet_scraping/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/11/microsoft_azure_chatgpt_ai/
[13] https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/06/twitter_threatens_to_sue_meta/
[14] https://www.ft.com/content/2a96995b-c799-4281-8b60-b235e84aefe4
[15] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZK8ihoD4kp@FpBt45W09bgAAAMA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[16] https://www.linkedin.com/in/yuhuai-tony-wu-02a641b5/?originalSubdomain=ca
[17] https://www.linkedin.com/in/christian-szegedy-bb284816/
[18] https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/30/ai_human_extinction/
[19] https://twitter.com/xai/status/1679178250017456128
[20] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Those hoping to get a better explanation than Musk's brief [1]tweet by visiting xAI's [2]website won't find much to help them understand what the company actually plans to do there, either.
"The goal of xAI is to understand the true nature of the universe," xAI said of itself, adding more would be explained in a Twitter Spaces chat to be held Friday, July 14.
[3]
We've known Musk had his own ambitions for an AI platform for some time. The earliest indications that the Twitter CEO was planning to take his AI ball and go home to build his own version of that technology, too, came in [4]March when news came out His Muskiness was seeking developers for the project.
[5]
[6]
It was at that point that Deepmind and OpenAI engineer Igor Babuschkin was rumored to have joined the project, a fact that was confirmed by Babuschkin's name on xAI's site listing him right after Elon Musk.
Musk has been looking into build his own " [7]anti-woke " chatbot that wouldn't, to his mind, be biased in favor of the political left. Babuschkin [8]previously told The Information that Musk was less focused on removing restrictions from AI chatbots and more driven to improve their reasoning and penchant to [9]fabricate the truth.
[10]Elon Musk yearns for AI devs to build 'anti-woke' rival ChatGPT bot
[11]Google says public data is fair game for training its AIs
[12]Here's how Microsoft hopes to inject ChatGPT into all your apps and bots via Azure
[13]From cage fight to page fight: Twitter threatens to sue Meta after Threads app launch
The Financial Times [14]reported in April that Musk had incorporated a company called xAI, per Nevada business records, which showed the serial CEO as the company's only director. Musk's personal money manager, Jared Birchall, is listed as secretary for the firm.
The FT said sources with knowledge of the move were aware that Musk had bought up "thousands of high-powered GPU processors from Nvidia," common components in the construction and operation of other large language model AIs, around the same timeframe.
[15]
Along with employing Musk, Birchall, Babuschkin and their roles, xAI employees listed on the fledgling company's website have worked for companies including Google and Microsoft research, Tesla and as academics at the University of Toronto. Names listed include [16]Tony Wu , [17]Christian Szegedy and Toby Pohlen, and others, each with several years of experience in AI and roles at various, often overlapping, companies.
[18]Dan Hendrycks , director of the Center for AI Safety, is listed as an advisor for the team. We reached out to Hendrycks and CAIS to see if they could share more details about xAI, but didn't immediately hear back.
Until then, expect hyperbole to be the rule of the day. "What are the most fundamental unanswered questions?" That's what xAI [19]tweeted in its first public statement. ®
Get our [20]Tech Resources
[1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1679164661869182976
[2] https://x.ai/
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2ZK8ihoD4kp@FpBt45W09bgAAAMA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[4] https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/06/ai_roundup/
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZK8ihoD4kp@FpBt45W09bgAAAMA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33ZK8ihoD4kp@FpBt45W09bgAAAMA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/06/ai_roundup/
[8] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/fighting-woke-ai-musk-recruits-team-to-develop-openai-rival
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/11/ai_models_supply_chain/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/06/ai_roundup/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/06/google_ai_models_internet_scraping/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/11/microsoft_azure_chatgpt_ai/
[13] https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/06/twitter_threatens_to_sue_meta/
[14] https://www.ft.com/content/2a96995b-c799-4281-8b60-b235e84aefe4
[15] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZK8ihoD4kp@FpBt45W09bgAAAMA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[16] https://www.linkedin.com/in/yuhuai-tony-wu-02a641b5/?originalSubdomain=ca
[17] https://www.linkedin.com/in/christian-szegedy-bb284816/
[18] https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/30/ai_human_extinction/
[19] https://twitter.com/xai/status/1679178250017456128
[20] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: "to understand reality."
Doctor Syntax
Surely all it has to do is ask Musk. It seems that as far as he's concerned reality is what he says it is.
Re: "to understand reality."
b0llchit
Are you saying, Musk is and has always been the AI everybody has been looking for? Surely would explain reality adequately.
Re: "to understand reality."
Doctor Syntax
What if it tells him to pay his bills?
Re: "to understand reality."
b0llchit
That cannot be real. Needs to do a bit more relearning to see real reality real.
Well at least now we know why
Guido Esperanto
He limited the twitter api behind a paywall..
He didnt want ai training its LLM off twitter.
.
.
.
Because he wanted to train HIS LLM off twitter.
Re: Well at least now we know why
Dan 55
Well then if it's trained on Twitter as sure as shit it's not going to understand reality.
Re: Well at least now we know why
DS999
And it may rival Microsoft's Tay for most extremist chatbot
"The goal of xAI is to understand the true nature of the universe"
Howard Sway
Yep, I'm sure that your little computer program will succeed where countless generations of physicists, philosophers and poets have "failed".
The grandiosity of his compulsive desire to get the most attention in every field that catches his attention is getting tiresome. I'd love one of the team to phone him up one day and go "It's working! It's working! It's actually deduced the truth by itself! But some may find it a little offensive..". When he says "Fuck the anti-woke crowd - tell me what it said" they can send him the output which reads "Elon Musk is a tedious egotistical asshole".
Jim Mitchell
The answer is 42, Elon.
Hyperbollocks
MrDamage
Is the correct term to use when discussing anything spewing forth from Musks front orifice.
"to understand reality."
And then have the patience to explain to Elon? Is the man showing some self-awareness at last?
"These deadline claims are short, those deliverable products are far away"