Elon Musk is preparing to Launch X.ai, a new Artificial Intelligence (AI) startup.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Musk incorporated X.ai last month in Nevada and has authorized the sale of 100 million shares of the new company.
Musk is reportedly the sole director of the company, and the secretary is Jared Birchall, a confidante and director of Musk’s family office.
Musk, according to Financial Times, has been assembling a team of AI researchers and engineers, including employees of leading AI companies like DeepMind.
X.ai was announced weeks after Elon Musk and some other key players in the tech industry expressed their concern over large scale AI developments and its potential dangers to humanity especially without regulations or oversight in an open letter which called for a 6-month pause on training of AI systems more powerful than Open AI’s GPT-4.
X.ai may have been set up to compete directly with Open AI which Elon Musk co-founded in 2015 .
Open AI was founded to create artificial intelligence that could benefit humanity without causing harm or being influenced by corporate or political agenda, but Musk left the Open AI board on the grounds of potential conflict of interest with his work at Tesla in 2018.
“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, adding that it was “better to part ways on good terms.”
Business Insider reported that Musk had purchased thousands of Graphic Processing Units (GPUs) to power oncoming generative AI products, although when asked during a Twitter interview, Musk made a light comment saying “it seems like everyone and their dog is buying GPUs at this time”
The company name X.ai resonates with Musk’s vision of creating an “Everything App” called “X.”