Tesla and Twitter chief Elon Musk is reportedly planning to launch a new artificial intelligence (AI) start-up to compete with ChatGPT-maker OpenAI as the billionaire looks to join the competition for generative AI systems. Musk’s advances in this regard are bound to raise after he led a letter, cosigned by thousands of other tech figures, calling for a halt on the development of GPT-style models over safety concerns. He has publicly criticised OpenAI for becoming, according to his opinion, less transparent and too commercially minded in its pursuit of advanced AI.
According to a report by Financial Times, the billionaire Tesla CEO is bringing together a team of artificial intelligence researchers and engineers, people privy with the plans said.
Musk is in discussions with several investors in SpaceX and Tesla to invite funding into his new venture, the report mentioned that citing a person with direct knowledge of the talks. “A bunch of people are investing in it . . . it’s real and they are excited about it,” the person said, as quoted by FT.
Musk’s Opportunity To Take On Open AI
The new company would give Musk the opportunity to take on OpenAI, the Microsoft-backed platform that he co-founded in 2015. He left the board in 2018 over disagreements with its management, including AI safety, the report said citing two people involved in OpenAI at the time.
“Tesla was competing for some of the same people as OpenAI & I didn’t agree with some of what OpenAI team wanted to do,” Musk tweeted in 2019, further stating that it was “better to part ways on good terms”.
The report cited Nevada business records as informing that the Twitter chief incorporated a company named X.AI on March 9. He is the company’s only director, its secretary is listed as Jared Birchall who manages Musk’s wealth.
Meanwhile, for the new AI project, Musk is said to have secured thousands of high-powered GPU processors from Nvidia, as per people cited by the FT report. GPUs are the high-end chips needed to build a large language model — AI systems capable of taking in enormous amounts of content and producing humanlike writing or realistic imagery.
The billionaire is said to be recruiting engineers from top AI labs including DeepMind, the report cited individuals privy to the developments as saying. They said he began exploring the space of a rival company earlier this year in response to the rapid progress of OpenAI.
As per the report, he has brought on Igor Babuschkin, a former DeepMind employee, and roughly half a dozen other engineers.
The report further mentioned insiders as saying that Musk’s new AI venture is separate from his other companies even as it could use Twitter content as data to train its language model and use Tesla for computing resources.
Recently, the Twitter CEO became increasingly vocal in his fears of broader threats from AI systems. He said he is particularly concerned about the threat of models such as GPT-4, OpenAI’s latest release, to promote falsehoods and exhibit political bias.
Currently, tech giants Microsoft, Google and Amazon are engaged with start-ups such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Adept and StabilityAI, in the race for advanced AI. These ventures have raised billions of dollars in recent months.