Elon Musk to develop artificial intelligence, founds new corporation X.AI
Twitter and Tesla CEO Elon Musk has established a new company, seemingly to develop artificial intelligence (AI), according to a recent company filing.
Company will be headed by Musk
The relevant filing, dated March 9 but newly publicizied, lists Musk as director of a company called X.AI. It also lists Musk’s associate, Jared Birchall, as secretary.
It additionally indicates that X.AI has been established in the state of Nevada and that the company currently has $100,000 of capital.
The filing does not name any other employees or company plans, nor does it explicitly state that the company will work with AI beyond what is implied in the name.
The letter “X” is being used in several of Musk’s business endeavors. Twitter Inc. was recently renamed to X Corp., and that company is in turn owned by another company called X Holding Corp. Those decisions seem to be part of Musk’s plans to create an “everything app” called X, which will blend social networking and payment tools.
The “X” naming trend dates back to Musk’s early financial firm, X.com, which was founded in 1999 and became PayPal in 2000.
Musk’s involvement with AI
Musk has a long history of involvement in the AI industry. He founded OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, in 2015 but left the firm in 2018.
More recent reports from February suggest that Musk has recruited Igor Babuschkin — formerly of Google’s Deepmind AI division — to develop an alternative to ChatGPT.
Despite his interest in AI, Musk is one of several experts who have signed a letter urging for temporary restraints on AI training. Such restraints would help avoid any unknown risks and ensure “a long AI summer,” the letter says.
There is no indication that Musk’s AI efforts will make use of cryptocurrency. In fact, Musk suggested in March that he is now more interested in AI than cryptocurrency — though it is unclear whether that statement was made in jest.
Musk has not publicly commented on the new firm X.AI.
