(San Francisco) Elon Musk founded a new artificial intelligence (AI) company in March, called X.AI and based in Nevada, according to an official document seen by AFP on the register of registered companies in this American state.
According to an article published Friday by the Financial Times (FT), the new entity must compete with OpenAI, the Californian company that designed ChatGPT, a generative AI program capable of interacting with humans and producing all kinds texts on request.
The success of this interface since its release at the end of November has launched a real race for this high-potential technology.
Since the end of February, various specialized media have reported that Elon Musk is investing in this area.
According to their anonymous sources, he recently recruited Igor Babuschkin and Manuel Kroiss, both of whom went through DeepMind, the AI branch of Alphabet (parent company of Google).
He is also said to have purchased some 10,000 graphics processors – computers needed to train language models, the foundation of generative AI systems.
The entrepreneur, however, signed a call last month to take a break from research on next-generation AI.
The hundreds of signatories discuss various risks associated with this technology, and ask themselves: “Is it desirable to develop non-human minds that may eventually outnumber and outwit us, and replace us?” “.
Elon Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015, before leaving the company in 2018.
He has since criticized the company, notably saying in a tweet last December that it trains the AI to be “woke” (a term designating a fringe of the American left), that is to say to “lie”.
X.AI’s official registration document, dated March 9, 2023, lists a single director, Elon Musk, and a secretary, Jared Birchall – an ex-Morgan Stanley banker who manages the multibillionaire’s fortune, according to the FT.
“X” is a mathematical symbol that the boss of Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter and Neuralink is particularly fond of.
Prior to the Twitter acquisition, he made cryptic allusions to “X”, his vision of an all-purpose application (messaging, social network, financial services…), like WeChat in China.
He recently changed the name of Twitter to “X Corp”, and the social network’s headquarters are no longer in Delaware (where most American companies are located), but in Nevada.
It is found in the first name of one of his children, a boy baptized X Æ A-12.
