xAI, all about Elon Musk’s “top secret” artificial intelligence company
On artificial intelligence (AI) Elon Musk said, went back and did everything. Now he has come out into the open with his xAI project that wants to "understand the true nature of the universe", for the moment with a team of 11 men (besides him), many of whom come from Google's DeepMind. Facts, numbers, forecasts and comments
Elon Musk thinks a hundred and… does a thousand.
After having first participated with a generous donation in the birth of the OpenAI software house (and therefore in that of ChatGpt), having slipped away from it in 2018 due to unclear circumstances, having signed the so-called anti-manifesto at the end of March this year ChatGpt (because generative artificial intelligence "poses profound risks for humanity") only to be caught secretly setting up his own AI company, called xAI, officially presented yesterday.
And he obviously didn't hide the goal of competing with OpenAI.
THE BIRTH OF xAI (OR PULCINELLA'S SECRET)
Already in mid-April, just over two weeks after the alarm raised with an open letter by Musk and other professors and experts on the risks to humanity posed by generative artificial intelligence, the media were writing about a startup founded by the billionaire , of which very little was known but whose name left no room for much doubt.
xAI, in fact, silently established in the US state of Nevada, immediately led to the assumption that it would deal with artificial intelligence. Additionally, Musk had also purchased thousands of processors from Nvidia for the new project, according to the Financial Times .
MUSK'S AI PROJECT
After not having leaked anything in recent months, yesterday Musk finally revealed a few more details about his mysterious project, whose mission is "to understand the true nature of the universe". When the first rumors began to circulate, Musk had spoken to Fox News about the idea of naming his chatbot TruthGpt , with the aim of creating “the ultimate truth-seeking artificial intelligence” and which “hopefully does more good than bad."
The xAI company reports that it is consulting with Dan Hendrycks, director of the Center for AI Safety, a group it has warned in a new call about what it sees as the existential dangers of rapid AI development.
THE TEAM
The billionaire will head up the San Francisco Bay Area-based xAI company, who will lead a 12-strong team of executives who hail from leading AI companies including OpenAI, Google's DeepMind, Microsoft and Tesla, as well as academic institutions such as the University of Toronto.
Announcing formation of @xAI to understand reality
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 12, 2023
Among the little information available on the company's website are the names of the team members, with associated Twitter profiles. One of them, Christian Szegedy, worked for years as a researcher at DeepMind. Other former Googlers are Igor Babuschkin, Zizhang Dai, Tony Wu and Toby Pohlen.
From the University of Toronto (and after an internship in DeepMind) come the academics Guodong Zhang and Jimmy Ba, a professor who studied with the godfather of artificial intelligence, Geoffrey Hinton , who recently retired after a life at Google to be able to talk freely about the “great dangers” it will cause from AI.
Ba, among other things, Bloomberg points out, is “one of the best-known hires” in xAI because he co-authored, along with Diederik Kingma, a 2014 paper on deep learning optimization known as the “Adam” paper – “the article most cited in the field of AI, with 95,460 citations, according to science networking site ResearchGate.
THE ASSES IN MUSK'S SLEEVE
Other than that, Musk didn't say much more. The billionaire, now 52, now heads six companies: Tesla, SpaceX,Twitter , Neuralink , Boring Co., and xAI. Announcing the latest news, he let it be known that it will be independent of Twitter's new parent company, X Corp, but will work closely with it, as well as with Tesla.
As Wired notes, while Musk's project might seem like a "bold gamble" because "at this stage, xAI likely lacks the cloud computing power needed to compete with OpenAI, Microsoft and Google" and "its a relatively small team of researchers does not seem to be able to beat the global competition when compared to the hundreds of resources that each of the already established companies can employ in AI projects”, the entrepreneur has an ace up his sleeve: “he has significant resources to which tap into".
Starting from Twitter's data from conversations on the platform, which "lend themselves well to training large language models such as those underlying ChatGpt", and from "Tesla's considerable experience, ed . ] in building large clusters computing power for AI, which could be used to augment the computing power of the xAI cloud." Incidentally, the company specializing in the production of electric cars is now designing its own chips for AI and is also building a humanoid robot, which in the future could help and be helped by xAI.
THE COMMENT OF ONE OF THE COMPETITORS
Bloomberg then reported the comment of one of the most "interesting" competitors, according to Microsoft . “Elon is one of the great entrepreneurs of our time,” said Reid Hoffman, cofounder of LinkedIn and startup Inflection AI. Hoffman, a former OpenAI board member, went on to add that Musk "has the credentials to advance the development of the technology."
In addition to the praise, however, Hoffman also declared "that it is important to have inclusive voices in the sector", commenting on the absence of women in the team, and criticized the request by the Tesla CEO for a pause in the development of AI, which Musk signed before launching the company: "I don't look favorably on signing a six-month break while you're trying to ramp up your effort."
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/xai-tutto-sulla-segretissima-societa-di-intelligenza-artificiale-di-elon-musk/ on Thu, 13 Jul 2023 10:49:47 +0000.