On Friday (Apr 14), business documents revealed that Elon Musk has formed X.AI Corporation. An artificial intelligence corporation based in Nevada, despite calling for an overall pause in developing AI.
Musk, already the CEO of Twitter and Tesla, has purchased thousands of expensive computing processors and hired engineering talent as part of an AI project at Twitter.
The founding date of X.AI was several weeks before Musk joined experts in signing an open letter calling for a six-month pause in the development of powerful AI systems.
The Musk-funded Future of Life Institute published the letter on its website. It was signed by academics and tech titans. This is including Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, urging regulation to ensure that AI systems were safe, as they posed “profound risks to society and humanity”.
Big tech companies such as Google, Meta, and Microsoft have been working on AI systems for years. OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT last year, a bot that can generate natural language text from a short prompt, supercharged interest in AI.
Musk co-founded OpenAI but left the company in 2018.