TECH NEWS – Tesla boss Elon Musk has announced the creation of an artificial intelligence startup. Meanwhile, he still believes AI will bring the end of the world…

The new Elon Musk company is called xAI and includes several engineers who have previously worked at companies such as OpenAI and Google. Musk has previously said that he thinks there should be a pause in AI development. Or that the sector needs regulation. He said the startup was created to “understand reality”.

It is unclear how much funding the company has, its specific goals, or what kind of AI it wants to focus on.

According to the company’s website, xAI aims to “understand the true nature of the universe”. The new company will hold a Twitter Spaces chat on Friday, revealing more details about its goals. Elon Musk was one of the original backers of OpenAI. They later created the popular big language model ChatGPT, which has become famous – often controversially – for uses such as helping students write homework.

But the billionaire’s relationship with the company has soured. He criticised ChatGPT for its liberal bias. “What we need is TruthGPT,” Musk tweeted back in February. He also disagrees with the way ChatGPT is run – and its close relationship with Microsoft. “It does seem weird that something can be a nonprofit, open source and somehow transform itself into a for-profit, closed source,” Musk said in an interview with CNBC.

In March, Musk signed an open letter calling for a halt to “massive artificial intelligence experiments”, which has now been signed by around 33 000 people. In an interview with the BBC in April, he said he had been concerned about the safety of AI for more than a decade. “I think we should set up a regulatory body to oversee AI so that it doesn’t pose a threat to the public,” he said.

Musk has also confronted AI companies over the data they use to train chatbots. These are software that scrapes a wealth of data from various sources to learn how to interact with humans to feed their knowledge and interaction style.

The billionaire believes that these models are scraping such a vast amount of data from Twitter that the company should be adequately compensated.

Musk bought the microblogging platform in a billion-dollar deal and then introduced sweeping changes that caused many to leave in protest. Among them is Shonda Rhimes, producer of shows such as Grey’s Anatomy and Bridgerton. As well as model Gigi Hadid and comedian and actor Stephen Fry.

Source: The Guardian