Insights Into xAI, The New Company From Elon Musk.
Elon Musk, revealed his intentions on Friday, July 14th, 2023 for a synergistic endeavor between the electric car giant and his newest venture, the artificial intelligence startup xAI. This collaborative effort will span across the realms of silicon technology and artificial intelligence (AI) software. The announcement was made during a live audio session on Twitter Spaces, where Musk also shared his plan to utilize Twitter data for the development of highly curious AI systems at xAI. The specifics regarding the financial aspects of this data acquisition from Twitter were not elaborated upon. Nor was the mention of “TruthGPT”, a term that was used by Musk over the last few months.
In October 2022, Musk spearheaded an acquisition of Twitter, accruing $13 billion in new debt. This move came at a time when Twitter was grappling with challenges in boosting its subscription revenue and facing lawsuits from former employees and vendors over non-payment issues. It’s noteworthy to mention that Musk’s other ventures, which include Tesla, SpaceX, and The Boring Co., have a longstanding record of inter-company transactions, as disclosed in Tesla’s financial filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Musk stated that every AI organization globally had illegally utilized Twitter’s data for training purposes. He did not clarify which laws were potentially breached by such data scraping activities. This claim comes in the wake of a recent lawsuit filed by Twitter in Texas against four undisclosed parties for data scraping. Because of this, Twitter has recently imposed rate limits on its platform due to rampant data scraping, causing significant strain on their system. Musk extended his apologies for any inconvenience caused by these rate limits. In the wake of such widespread use of Twitter’s public data by AI developers, Musk stated that xAI will also use this data for training purposes.
He further emphasized the value of Twitter’s dataset for AI text training and image/video training. However, Musk also expressed that AI systems require more than just human-generated data, indicating his hope that xAI could emulate the success of Alphabet’s DeepMind’s Alpha Zero, a computer program that mastered three games by playing against itself, this is called Self-Play in the AI community..
Referring to the Terminator films and their vision of a future destroyed by AI-powered robots, Musk said: “It’s actually important for us to worry about a Terminator future in order to avoid a Terminator future.” He said super intelligence – AI more “intelligent” and “gifted” than humans – could be five or six years away, which is faster than many experts’ estimates.
It is important to note that Tesla is actually an AI company as much as it is a manufacturing company. Many experts overlook this when they think of Tesla and Elon Musk. Tesla is using custom chips for AI on the cars and in the cloud. They are also building DOJO as a cloud platform that will add a far more complex AI infrastructure to the cars. In fact, one can say that Tesla is one of the top 5 AI companies in the world today. Thus, there will be many opportunities for cross sharing of technologies in the future as well as employees.
“If I could press pause on AI or really advanced AI digital superintelligence I would. It doesn’t seem like that is realistic so xAI is essentially going to build an AI … in a good way, sort of hopefully,”Elon Musk, July 14, 2023
Thus, we now have the official announcement of the AI company that many have speculated since Elon Musk had a falling out with the company he started, OpenAI. The premise of xAI vs. OpenAI are quite dramatic in scope and mission. The falling out Musk had, has a number of public and non-public foundations that span from OpenAI choosing to not be open source to internal personality conflicts. It is clear xAI is going to take on the original mission of OpenAI and to expand it to the first stated goal: “To understand the universe”.
There is quite a bit to unpack from the Twitter Spaces. I went about doing a deep study of each founding member, their careers, the work they have done, the patents they have filed and more to understand the foundations of the company and more importantly the type of AI technology they are aiming for and how they will achieve this.
In this member only article, I will explore the entire transcript from the Twitter Spaces along with my commentary of what it means. I will also show how they will achieve Super Intelligence and the technologies that will get them to reach this point. Our unique view into the future of xAI will allow us to see more clearly how AI technologies will play out, and also afford us to have unprecedented insight on opportunities that will arise from this shift.
The formation of xAI may just about spark a technology “World War” between companies that have a different path and perhaps even nations that have already taken a different path. No matter how it plays out, it is certain to be unlike any other technology battle we have ever witnessed.
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I can imagine a personal AI would be “useful” – but not for me personally (but for interaction with the “metaverse”). Yet how long would it take to train one on a virtually minimal dataset? (imagining it would need years of listening to me in the background for eg. v needing one in the next year say). Wondering therefore if there is a way to juice it up so that it can be useful from a small dataset? (actually – that is more like the way human intelligence works rather than AI LLM – probably answered my own question to some degree…)?
I take away from this analysis that at least it sound like xAI will try to adhere to some sound and decent tenets about leading AGI to be a real supertool to uplift humanity instead of becoming the big ultimate lock of mass control for good.
Excellent read. I learnt a lot. Thanks Brian