“The danger of training AI to be woke – in other words, lie – is deadly,” Musk tweeted in December, responding to a Twitter user who asked OpenAI’s CEO if it was possible to “turn off the woke settings” on ChatGPT.
Team members behind xAI are alumni of DeepMind, OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research, Twitter and Tesla, and have worked on projects including DeepMind’s AlphaCode and OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 chatbots.
Musk seems to be positioning xAI to compete with companies like OpenAI, Google and Anthropic, which are behind leading chatbots like ChatGPT, Bard and Claude.
According to Greg Yang, co-founder of xAI, the startup will delve into the “mathematics of deep learning,” a facet of AI, and “develop the ‘theory of everything’ for large neural networks” to take AI “to the next level.”
Musk reportedly incorporated xAI in Nevada in March. Previously, he had changed the name of Twitter to “X Corp.” in some financial filings, but on xAI’s website, the company notes its separation from X Corp., adding that it will “work closely with X (Twitter), Tesla, and other companies to make progress towards our mission.”