With Twitter in ruins, the SpaceX Starship program grounded, and Tesla facing renewed scrutiny over the dangers of its Autopilot software, Elon Musk has now set his sights on his next big venture: an AI company whose stated goal is nothing less than to "understand reality."
This does appear to be a serious enterprise. The team at do something about AI before we're all totally hosed.
The xAI website says the new company is separate from X Corp, the company Musk established earlier this year as a successor to Twitter, "but will work closely with X (Twitter), Tesla, and other companies to make progress towards our mission."
Musk has previously mused about wading into the murky waters of artificial intelligence: in April, he said he was working on buying Twitter.
While the xAI leadership team seems like it's mostly a collection of respectable figures in the field, Musk himself is unsurprisingly sending what could politely be called mixed signals in that regard.
The xAI website says interested followers will be able to "meet the team and ask us questions" in a Twitter Spaces chat set for July 14. As for why Musk revealed the company today, three days ahead of the big online showcase, apparently it's for essentially the same reason he insisted on SpaceX launching Starship on April 20 despite the fact that systems weren't fully ready: He thought it would be clever.
