Elon Musk Goes From Co-Founding OpenAI To Creating xAI, Seeking To 'Understand Reality'

Elon Musk‘s newest venture, xAI, seeks to "understand the true nature of the universe,” according to a website for the company that launched Wednesday.

What Happened: Musk, who runs both Tesla Inc TSLA and SpaceX, leads the team at xAI.

The startup’s team members include workers from DeepMind, OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research, Tesla, and the University of Toronto. Among them are Igor Babuschkin, Manuel Kroiss, Yuhuai Wu, Christian Szegedy, Jimmy Ba, Toby Pohlen, Ross Nordeen, Kyle Kosic, Greg Yang, Guodong Zhang, and Zihang Dai.

Dan Hendrycks, current director of the Center for AI Safety, will serve in an advisory role.

Despite xAI being a separate entity, it will closely cooperate with X Corp, Tesla, and other companies, according to the website.

The company also launched an official Twitter account in May, @xai, with 82,500 followers at the time of writing.

Read also: Tesla Quietly Launches New Tesla AI Twitter Account: Here’s Its First Thread

The choice of the name xAI refers to one of Musk’s earliest endeavors, X.com. The website was one of the pioneering online banking sites founded in December 1999. It eventually merged with PayPal Holdings Inc PYPL — a company Musk also co-founded — in March 2000 and later spun off into an independent entity.

Musk regained ownership of the domain name X.com from PayPal in 2017.

Why It’s Important: The new venture from Musk isn’t surprising for those who have been closely following his trajectory.

In April, he hinted at his AI ambitions in an interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson. Musk spoke about creating a “Truth GPT,” or a maximum truth-seeking AI, that attempts to comprehend the nature of the universe.

Musk has also expressed his concern about the potential dangers of AI, stressing the need for safety standards and an understanding of AI’s potential.

With the creation of xAI, Musk is set to compete against OpenAI, a company he left in 2018.

The xAi website announced a Twitter Spaces chat on Friday, July 14.