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Elon Musk spoke on Twitter about his new artificial intelligence company, xAI, and outlined the goal of developing super-intelligent AI that could help solve complex scientific and mathematical questions and “understand” the universe.
During a live audio event on the social media platform, Musk’s team of all-male math, AI, and engineering experts spoke about how they set out to create AI that’s smarter than humans, with the goal of helping society. Musk said the company’s fundamental goal is to understand “what the heck is really going on.”
The event showed that Musk initially seems more focused on answering deep scientific questions than directly competing with OpenAI, Google and Microsoft to develop consumer AI products. While Musk said he sees his company as an alternative to larger AI companies, he said xAI is still “embryonic” and it will take some time before it can catch up with OpenAI and Google.
The new wave of AI tools has surprised many artificial intelligence experts with their capabilities, and some leading experts in the field have pushed up their timelines to indicate how many years it will take for an AI creation to become generally smarter and more powerful than any human being. But current technology works by predicting what picture or word to say next, and there’s no evidence they can solve unanswered scientific questions. Many AI researchers say that human-level AI may be many decades away, if it ever materializes at all.
Musk said questions about the nature of dark matter or unsolved aspects of how gravity works could be among the mysteries his company is trying to unravel. He spoke at length about the “Fermi Paradox” – a theoretical question that asks why humans have not yet discovered extraterrestrials, and posits that technological civilizations usually self-destruct or are destroyed by an outside force before traveling to other solar systems .
Jimmy Ba, a University of Toronto professor and prominent AI researcher who has joined Musk’s company, said the goal is to create an AI that can help with a range of problems humanity is facing.
“How can we build an all-purpose problem-solving machine that will help all of us, humanity, overcome the toughest and most ambitious problems out there, and how can we use these tools to empower and empower ourselves,” Ba said.
Musk, who has criticized existing chatbots for being politically correct, said his company’s AI could offend people for telling the “truth.”
Musk has been open about AI for years, famously saying in 2014 that the invention of super-intelligent computers would amount to “summoning the demon” and could pose an existential threat to humanity. He helped found ChatGPT maker OpenAI in 2015, but left the company in 2018 after disagreements with his other executives. For the past few months, he’s complained about OpenAI and other AI companies collecting Twitter data to train their bots.
Tesla, the publicly traded electric vehicle company that Musk is the majority owner of, has a strong AI team that’s been working on bringing self-driving capabilities to its cars for years. Musk has stated that his new AI company will work closely with Twitter and Tesla. Investors have criticized Musk for using Tesla resources to support his other ventures, particularly Twitter.
“We will work with Tesla on the silicon space and maybe also on the AI software space,” Musk said, referring to Tesla’s custom silicon computer chips. “Of course, any relationship with Tesla must be a transaction on unrelated terms since Tesla is a public company with a different investor base.”
Training the “big language models” that form the backbone of modern AI tools requires vast amounts of data and stacks of computers to process all the information — an extremely expensive process. Tesla has significant computer processing power and has used it in its efforts to develop self-driving technology.
At the Twitter event, Musk said his company needs computing power, but hinted that it’s not as much as other companies. The team would remain relatively small, said Igor Babushkin, a former Google and OpenAI researcher who came to xAI.
Musk initially delayed the start of the event to wait for more listeners. He said he would adjust Twitter’s algorithm to make the space visible to more people. About 34,000 people listened as it started.
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