The next contender in Silicon Valley's AI gold rush could be a surprising one. Twitter and Tesla CEO Elon Musk is reportedly aiming to launch an artificial intelligence start-up to compete with OpenAI and its revolutionary AI chatbot ChatGPT.
According to a Financial Times report, Musk is in the process of bringing together a team of AI researchers and engineers to challenge OpenAI head-on. The report cites Nevada business records showing that Musk incorporated a company called X.AI on March 9, for which he's listed as the sole director.
The billionaire has reportedly already initiated talks with SpaceX and Tesla investors about the project.
“A bunch of people are investing in it… it’s real and they are excited about it,” a person with direct knowledge of the matter told the Financial Times.
To power his new AI venture, Musk has reportedly secured thousands of high-powered GPU processors from Nvidia and recruited engineers from AI labs, such as DeepMind. Nvidia is a leading manufacturer of graphics cards, like the upcoming GeForce RTX 40 series.
It's not clear whether there's a timeline for Musk's reported AI venture or what that may look like. But if all this shakes out, it's sure to raise some eyebrows.
Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015 but left the board three years later due to clashes with management over AI safety, among other issues. Just a few weeks ago, Musk co-signed a letter along with 1,800 others, including engineers from Amazon, DeepMind, Google and Meta, demanding a six-month pause on systems "more powerful" than ChatGPT-4 to implement tougher safety protocols for advanced AI design.
GPT-4 is the most recent version of OpenAI's language model behind the wildly popular ChatGPT; it can handle not only text inputs but images as well, among other upgrades. That poses some really promising potential use cases for search, given that providing results in multiple formats, including text, images, video and more, can make such a massive difference in search results. Microsoft has confirmed it's been secretly using GPT-4 to power its new AI-supercharged Bing with ChatGPT.
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