Skip to main content

Elon Musk’s new AI company aims to ‘understand the universe’

Elon Musk has just formed a new company that will seek to “understand the true nature of the universe.” No biggie, then.

Announced on Wednesday, the company, xAI, already has among its ranks artificial intelligence (AI) experts formerly of firms such as DeepMind, OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research, and Tesla.

Recommended Videos

The website for Musk’s new company currently comprises a single page with a profile of its top team and a call for experienced engineers and researchers to join the company in the Bay Area, San Francisco. It also includes the line: “The goal of xAI is to understand the true nature of the universe.”

Please enable Javascript to view this content

Meanwhile, in a tweet announcing the new initiative, Musk said xAI will aim to “understand reality.”

Announcing formation of @xAI to understand reality

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 12, 2023

xAI co-founder Greg Yang, a senior software engineer who’s worked at Apple, Google, and Microsoft, tweeted that the “mathematics of deep learning is profound, beautiful, and unreasonably effective,” adding that “developing the ‘theory of everything’ for large neural networks will be central to taking AI to the next level.” Yang added: “Conversely, this AI will enable everyone to understand our mathematical universe in ways unimaginable before.”

There’s really not a lot of other information about the ambitious-sounding endeavor at this time. However, xAI is planning to hold a Twitter Spaces event at a currently unspecified time on Friday, July 14, so more details should be revealed then.

It’s been rumored for some time that Musk, who currently leads SpaceX and Tesla and also owns Twitter, has been interested in getting his foot in the AI door.

In fact, he’s already been there, having been an early backer of OpenAI, the company behind the viral chatbot ChatGPT. Apparent disagreements over the approach to AI safety led Musk to split from OpenAI in 2018, several years before last year’s launch of the company’s powerful generative AI tool.

Musk’s second serious attempt to enter the sector looks very much like a bid to challenge the dominance of OpenAI, which now has backing from Microsoft to the tune of billions of dollars. However, some will be interested to see how the launch fits with his call in March for a six-month pause in the development of more advanced AI tools so that a set of agreed safety protocols can be agreed upon among industry players.

With a slew of AI companies already developing increasingly sophisticated tools for a range of tasks for both businesses and consumers, Musk looks late to the game. This could be partly down to his preoccupation with Twitter, which has been experiencing a chaotic time since he bought the company in October.

But now Musk will be hoping that by attracting the right team he can have a meaningful impact and challenge the current big hitters in the AI game.

Trevor Mogg
Contributing Editor
Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…
DeepSeek: everything you need to know about the AI that dethroned ChatGPT
robot hand in point space

A year-old startup out of China is taking the AI industry by storm after releasing a chatbot which rivals the performance of ChatGPT while using a fraction of the power, cooling, and training expense of what OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic's systems demand. Here's everything you need to know about Deepseek's V3 and R1 models and why the company could fundamentally upend America's AI ambitions.
What is DeepSeek?
DeepSeek (technically, "Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Basic Technology Research Co., Ltd.") is a Chinese AI startup that was originally founded as an AI lab for its parent company, High-Flyer, in April, 2023. That May, DeepSeek was spun off into its own company (with High-Flyer remaining on as an investor) and also released its DeepSeek-V2 model. V2 offered performance on par with other leading Chinese AI firms, such as ByteDance, Tencent, and Baidu, but at a much lower operating cost.

The company followed up with the release of V3 in December 2024. V3 is a 671 billion-parameter model that reportedly took less than 2 months to train. What's more, according to a recent analysis from Jeffries, DeepSeek's “training cost of only US$5.6m (assuming $2/H800 hour rental cost). That is less than 10% of the cost of Meta’s Llama.” That's a tiny fraction of the hundreds of millions to billions of dollars that US firms like Google, Microsoft, xAI, and OpenAI have spent training their models.

Read more
Perplexity’s new AI agent can perform multi-step tasks on your Android device
Running Perplexity on OnePlus Pad 2.

Perplexity announced Thursday that it is beginning to roll out an agentic AI for Android devices, called Perplexity Assistant, which will be able to independently take multi-step actions on behalf of its user.

"We are excited to launch the Perplexity Assistant to all Android users," Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas wrote in a post to X on Thursday. "This marks the transition for Perplexity from an answer engine to a natively integrated assistant that can call other apps and perform basic tasks for you."

Read more
Elon Musk claims Trump’s Stargate backers ‘don’t actually have the money’
Elon musk as a cowboy

Mere hours after the OpenAI announced the ambitious Stargate Project, which would see up to $500 billion in private AI infrastructure construction over the next four years, Tesla CEO and newly-minted presidential advisor Elon Musk alleged on social media that the project's backers, "don’t actually have the money."

https://x.com/OpenAI/status/1881830103858172059

Read more