Business tycoon Elon Musk launched Wednesday a new company focused on artificial intelligence (AI) ventures, called “xAI,” to “understand reality.”
The billionaire elaborated his vision for the AI startup via a live Twitter Spaces session on Friday. He disclosed that xAI would collaborate with the most valuable automaker Tesla on both the “AI software” and “silicon” front. He further noted that xAI would partner with his social media platform Twitter for the necessary data to train its AI systems and produce “maximally curious” products.
About the xAI
xAI is a distinct business entity from X Corp/Twitter. Nonetheless, the startup aims to implement a collaborative approach with plans to tap many firms as it attempts to achieve its mission.
The xAI team comprises highly skilled experts with AI backgrounds, mostly from Tesla, OpenAI, and Microsoft.
It currently has 12 members, including the following: Igor Babuschkin, Manuel Kroiss, Yuhuai (Tony) Wu, Christian Szegedy, Jimmy Ba, Toby Pohlen, Ross Nordeen, Kyle Kosic, Greg Yang, Guodong Zhang, and Zihang Dai. The xAI team is an expert in developing AI models like AlphaCode, Inception, GPT-3.5, GPT4, and Minerva.
Co-founder Greg Yang shared on Twitter the AI startup’s purpose, saying it aims to “develop the ‘theory of everything’ for large neural networks.” He further noted that the company prioritizes mathematical bases of deep learning as it intends to better explain the mathematical universe for all.
Musk’s initial outlook on AI technology
The American billionaire initially had a vague stance regarding AI’s advancement. He previously expressed that AI can potentially aid Tesla in its future endeavors, particularly in achieving full autonomy.
However, he also had doubts about the technology’s possible adverse effect on humanity. In fact, he demanded a temporary stop to AI training in the industry, along with other companies against AI development.
Despite all that, Musk believes that xAI would advance in the industry that highly benefits humans in a way that sparks curiosity, leading them to seek reality.
“I think I have been banging the drum on AI safety now for a long time. If I could press pause on AI or advanced AI digital superintelligence, I would. It doesn’t seem like that is realistic. So xAI is essentially going to build an AI, you know, you’ve got to grow an AI in a good way, hopefully.”
Elon Musk stated during the Twitter Spaces
Would xAI program morality into AI?
Musk expressed apprehensions about the intricacy of programming morality into AI. He noted that it is more significant to promote humanity instead of trying to develop explicit moral programming.
“…The premise of an AI is to sort of have an AI that is maximally curious, maximally truth-seeking, and this may get a little esoteric here, but I think that a curious AI, one that is trying to understand the universe, I think I want it to be pro-humanity from the standpoint that humanity is just so much more interesting than not-humanity.
Obviously, I’m a big fan of Mars and that we should become a spacefaring civilization, and a multi-planet species, but Mars is quite frankly boring relative to Earth. It’s a bunch of rocks, and there’s no life that we’ve detected, not even microbial life. But Earth, with the vast complexity of life that exists, is vastly more interesting than Mars.
You just learn a lot more with humanity being there, and, I think fostering humanity, if you are trying to understand the true nature of the universe, that’s the best thing that I can come up with from an AI safety standpoint.
I think this is better than trying to explicitly program morality into AI. because if you program in a certain morality, you have to say well what morality are you programming? Who’s making those decisions? And even if you are extremely good with how you program morality, there’s still a morality, inversion problem. This is sometimes called the Waluigi problem, which is if you program Luigi, you inherently get Waluigi by inverting Luigi. Haha, to use Super Mario metaphors. I mean this is starting to get quite esoteric, but hopefully, this makes some sense.”
Elon Musk
Nonetheless, he recognized AI’s tremendous power, noting that he was cautious in penetrating the industry.
Would AI surpass the relevance of human existence?
Musk also contemplated human existence’s relevance in a world where AI exceeds human abilities.
“[…] I could talk about this for a long time, it’s something that I’ve thought about for a really long time, and actually was somewhat reluctant to do anything in this space because I am concerned about the immense power of digital superintelligence. It’s something that, I think is maybe hard for us to even comprehend.
Even if AI is extremely benign, the question of relevance, perhaps, comes up. If it can do anything better than any human, what’s the point of existing? That is also an issue? Do we even have relevance in such a scenario? That’s the bad side of it. The good side, obviously, is that in an AI future where you really will have… an age of plenty where […] there will be no shortage of goods and services. Any scarcity will be simply scarcity that we self-define as scarcity. It could be a unique piece of art or a house in a specific location. It’s artificially defined scarcity but goods and services will not be scarce in a positive AGI future. But I think it’s also important for us to worry about a terminator future in order to avoid a terminator future.”
Elon Musk
The business tycoon’s confidence in fostering a positive AI future remains strong. He believes that AI can offer humanity concepts to address the world’s most major problems efficiently.
See Also:
The launch of xAI signifies Elon Musk’s latest move toward the AI industry. Surprisingly, he admitted that the team would take some time to actually compete with AI behemoths like OpenAI, Microsoft AI, and Google DeepMind.
Nonetheless, Elon Musk’s high valuation for human existence is remarkable, considering that AI’s ethical development will certainly be the main concern in global discussions.
You can access Elon Musk’s full discussion about the xAI in the Tweet link below:
