Musk is officially launching his own AI company

Tech billionaire Elon Musk has big ambitions for his own company to develop artificial intelligence: it must “understand the true nature of the universe”. Musk announced the goal Wednesday during the company’s official launch, dubbed xAI.

The company’s formation had already become known months ago – while Musk, citing potentially unmanageable security risks, advocated a six-month hiatus from AI development.

The busy businessman was once involved in the foundation of the start-up OpenAI, which developed the popular AI chatbot ChatGPT, among other things. However, he later fell out with the other co-founders and became a harsh critic.

ChatGPT can form sentences on a human level and helped spark the current hype around artificial intelligence. At the same time, however, the software, which has been trained on huge amounts of data, can give completely incorrect information, as it mainly estimates word-for-word how a sentence could continue – and the plausibility sometimes falls by the wayside.

Musk wants to run companies himself

Musk himself will lead xAI, according to the company’s website. He is already the boss of the electric car maker Tesla and the aerospace company SpaceX. Musk also led the tunneling start-up Boring Company and the company Neuralink, which aims to connect the human brain to computers with implants. He relinquished his position as head of Twitter’s short message service, but he still plays an important role as owner.

In addition to Musk, eleven men were introduced as the first employees of xAI, who previously worked at Google, among others. (saw/sda/dpa)