Elon Musk announces latest company, xAI

Elon Musk on Wednesday announced his latest company, xAI, which he said in a tweet is meant “to understand reality.”

Musk, whose portfolio also includes Twitter, Tesla, and SpaceX, didn’t provide any other details or explanations. The company’s website says its goal is “to understand the true nature of the universe.”

The landing page of the website explains little on what the company will do, but provides background of the 12 team members.

Initial employees include veterans of Google’s DeepMind, OpenAI, Google Research, and Microsoft Research. “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,” the company’s website states. “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.”

Dan Hendrycks, who is the director of the Center for AI Safety, is advising the team. xAI is formed as a separate entity from Musk’s broader X Corp, but said it will work closely with Twitter, Tesla, “and other companies to make progress toward our mission.”