Announcing xai
July 12th 2023
Today we announce the formation of xai.

The goal of xai is to understand the true nature of the universe.
You can meet the team and ask us questions during a Twitter Spaces chat on Friday, July 14th.

Team
Our team is led by Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX. We have previously worked at DeepMind, OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research, Tesla, and the University of Toronto. Collectively we contributed some of the most widely used methods in the field, in particular the Adam optimizer, Batch Normalization, Layer Normalization, and the discovery of adversarial examples. We further introduced innovative techniques and analyses such as Transformer-XL, Autoformalization, the Memorizing Transformer, Batch Size Scaling, and μTransfer. We have worked on and led the development of some of the largest breakthroughs in the field including AlphaStar, AlphaCode, Inception, Minerva, GPT-3.5, and GPT-4.

Elon Musk
Igor Babuschkin
Manuel Kroiss
Yuhuai (Tony) Wu
Christian Szegedy
Jimmy Ba
Toby Pohlen
Ross Nordeen
Kyle Kosic
Greg Yang
Guodong Zhang
Zihang Dai
Advisory
Our team is advised by Dan Hendrycks who currently serves as the director of the Center for AI Safety.

Relation to X Corp
We are a separate company from X Corp, but will work closely with X (Twitter), Tesla, and other companies to make progress towards our mission.

Elon Musk has created a new artificial intelligence company called X.AI Corp. that is incorporated in Nevada, according to a state filing.

Mr. Musk is the only listed director of the company, and Jared Birchall, the director of Mr. Musk’s family office, is its secretary, according to the filing made last month. X.AI has authorized the sale of 100 million shares for the privately held company.

The business invokes the name of what Mr. Musk has described as his effort to create an everything app called X.  Twitter, also owned by Mr. Musk recently changed its name to X Corp. The social-media company was also incorporated in Nevada instead of its previous domicile in Delaware, according to a legal filing last week. X Corp. has a parent company named X Holdings Corp. 

Compared with Delaware, Nevada’s laws grant more discretion and protection to a company’s management and officers, according to legal experts.

Mr. Musk didn’t respond to a request for comment on X.AI. The billionaire at times has warned about the risks from AI technology and advocated for governments to regulate it.

As part of his AI ambitions, Mr. Musk has spent the past few months recruiting researchers with the goal of creating a rival effort to OpenAI, the artificial intelligence company that launched the viral chatbot ChatGPT in November, according to researchers familiar with the outreach. OpenAI has set off a fever pitch of investor interest in the sector. 

Mr. Musk co-founded OpenAI eight years ago but left the company in early 2018 after losing a power struggle to its current chief executive, Sam Altman, the Wall Street Journal reported. Mr. Musk has complained that ChatGPT is politically biased and told associates that he wants to create AI models that are more truth-seeking, though he hasn’t publicly stated what that would mean.

The Tesla Inc. chief executive recently recruited Igor Babuschkin, a scientist at artificial intelligence lab DeepMind, owned by Alphabet Inc., to helm the new effort. He has also tried to recruit employees at OpenAI to join the new lab but has had limited success, people familiar with the efforts said. The Information earlier reported on Mr. Babuschkin’s hire. 

Mr. Musk’s new lab, if successful, will add yet another entrant to a heated race among tech companies to develop more powerful artificial intelligence models. OpenAI earlier this year released GPT-4, an AI model designed to mimic human reading and writing that was able to outperform most people on standardized exams like the LSAT. The technology is also being integrated into a new version of Microsoft Inc’s Bing search engine. Google and Amazon.com Inc. also have announced AI initiatives, as well as others.

Late last month, Mr. Musk joined some tech executives and AI researchers in calling for a six month or more moratorium on developments in advanced AI technology that, proponents of the pause argue, would give the industry time to set safety standards for their design and head off potential harms.

Mr. Musk has a long association with the X name. His former online banking startup that later became PayPal after a merger with another firm was called X.com. And he refers to one of his children as X.