MUSK LAUNCHES CHATGPT’S OPENAI COMPETITOR XAI TO ‘UNDERSTAND REALITY’

Team members behind xAI are alumni of DeepMind, OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research, Twitter and Tesla, and have worked on projects including DeepMind’s AlphaCode and OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 chatbots. Musk seems to be positioning xAI to compete with companies like OpenAI, Google and Anthropic, which are behind leading chatbots like ChatGPT, Bard and Claude.

Dan Hendrycks, the director of the Center for AI Safety, is advising the company, according to its website. Hendrycks earlier this year organised an open letter warning that AI could pose existential risks to humanity, a concern echoed by Musk.

Musk helped to co-found OpenAI in 2015 but left the San Francisco-based startup in 2018 over what he has described as a conflict of interest related to his work on AI at electric carmaker Tesla.

Musk, who has taken aim at the “woke mind virus” in society, has since accused the firm’s groundbreaking language bot ChatGPT of being biased in favour of left-wing and politically correct views.

Since buying Twitter for $44bn in October, Musk, a self-described free speech absolutist, has loosened moderation rules and reinstated previously banned right-wing accounts, which critics say has led to a surge in hate speech and extremism on the platform.

Musk announced in April that he planned to introduce a competitive chatbot by the name of TruthGPT.

In an interview, Musk stated that the upcoming chatbot would be a “maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe”.