Elon Musk has founded a new artificial intelligence (AI) company called X.AI, according to an article by The Wall Street Journal. The company was incorporated in Nevada last month, with Musk listed as its director and Jared Birchall, director of Musk’s family office, as its secretary. The filing also reveals that Musk created the business on March 9th, 2023.
Speculation about Musk’s interest in founding an AI company had been circulating for some time, with reports suggesting that he had purchased thousands of graphic processing units (GPUs) for a generative AI product. The Financial Times reported that Musk planned to compete with the Microsoft-backed OpenAI and had even sought funding from SpaceX and Tesla investors to get the company started.
During an interview on Twitter Spaces, when asked about his purchase of GPUs, Musk did not mention plans to create an AI company, saying that “everyone and their dog is buying GPUs at this point.” However, the name X.AI aligns with the branding of the X Corp. name he has assigned to Twitter, and his vision of an “everything app.”
Musk has been critical of OpenAI, the AI organization he co-founded in 2015 but left in 2018, and recently signed a letter calling for a pause on “giant AI experiments.” OpenAI has gained significant recognition through its development of technology like ChatGPT and GPT-4, and is partly responsible for driving Microsoft and Google’s efforts to integrate AI tools more deeply into their products.
