(New York) Elon Musk announced on Wednesday the launch of a new company focused on artificial intelligence, a still mysterious project that should be revealed in more detail on Friday.

“The goal of xAI is to understand the true nature of the universe,” the startup company says on its site, without further elaboration.

Elon Musk explained to him, on Twitter, that xAI aims to “understand reality”. The site announces a question and answer session on Friday on Twitter to discuss this newcomer to AI.

The company was formally incorporated in Nevada in March, according to that state’s corporate registry, but says its technical team is located in the San Francisco, Calif., area. When recording, xAI listed Elon Musk as director.

The billionaire admitted several months ago that he had purchased a large quantity of graphics cards (GPU-graphics processing unit), essential for the development of artificial intelligence (AI) software, without revealing what he intended to do with them.

“We are a separate company from X Corp,” the holding company that notably controls Twitter, “but we will work closely with X, Tesla, and other companies to advance our mission,” officials say on the site.

Elon Musk already controls Tesla, aerospace company SpaceX, Twitter, as well as tunnel boring machine The Boring Company and Neuralink, which specializes in neural implants.

The xAI team, “led by Elon Musk”, according to the site, is made up of recognized specialists in artificial intelligence, some of whom come from OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT, Google or Microsoft.

During a Fox Channel interview with host Tucker Carlson in April, Elon Musk said he planned to “create a third option” among AI heavyweights, in addition to Microsoft/OpenAI and Google. .

The two tech giants have created the most advanced interfaces in terms of so-called generative AI, which offer written answers to all types of questions formulated in everyday language.

“We’re way behind schedule,” the entrepreneur admitted.

He had called his project “TruthGPT”, referring to AI software “that seeks the truth as much as possible, that tries to understand the true nature of the universe”.

According to Elon Musk, an artificial intelligence model “that would look at the universe would probably not destroy the human species, because we are an interesting part of the universe. Hopefully he will think that way. »