• Elon Musk has unveiled his rival firm to Open AI after weeks of teases.
• The new startup is called xAI where Musk and a team of engineers will deliver an alternative to ChatGPT.
• This new AI will be focused on “maximum truth-seeking,” a phrase that Musk invented.

Elon Musk, who once famously said that advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics could wipe out mankind, has launched a company that seeks to offer an alternative to ChatGPT’s generative AI.

This new foray is called xAI – to work closely with the X group of companies – and was launched on Wednesday, with Musk setting himself up as its chief executive. This will be the billionaire’s second AI startup. He co-founded OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT, in 2018, but departed the firm long before it saw its monumental success.

“The Goal of xAI is to understand the true nature of the universe,” reads the official website of the startup, before running down some of the engineers at the firm. This includes individuals who have worked at Google’s DeepMind, OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research, Tesla and the University of Toronto.

“We have worked on and led the development of some of the largest breakthroughs in the field including AlphaStar, AlphaCode, Inception, Minerva, GPT-3.5, and GPT-4,” it continues.

The launch of a generative AI firm by Musk follows the rest of the tech industry. The innovation, brought to popular zeitgeist by ChatGPT has been co-opted by most of the world’s big tech companies, including Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Alibaba, and Baidu, among many more.

Generative AI is not only impressive in its capabilities to make life easier, but it also makes a lot of money.

Market analysis firm McKinsey told Reuters that generative AI could potentially generate $7.3 trillion across the world’s economy every single year.

With Musk down $44 billion after his purchase of Twitter and the subsequent decline in user popularity for the social media firm, while rivals like Threads skyrocket, the Tesla founder will have to make back his money somehow. Despite the fact that he has been outspokenly anti-AI in the past.

For what product xAI will attempt to lure users away from ChatGPT with, Musk says that he will lead the creation of a “maximum truth-seeking AI.” Adding that he will launch something called “TruthGPT,” but how much this is part of his meme persona or a real product is yet to be revealed.

He is also yet to explain what truth-seeking AI is. All other references of this are linked back to Musk, so it seems it is his own invention and not a standard for the industry or the technology.

“If it tried to understand the true nature of the universe, that’s actually the best thing that I can come up with from an AI safety standpoint,” Musk said in a Twitter Spaces attended by Reuters.

“I think it is going to be pro-humanity from the standpoint that humanity is just much more interesting than not-humanity.”

The launch of xAI comes mere months after Musk and other tech leaders like Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak signed an open letter calling for AI development to take a pause as it was becoming too powerful, too quickly without any meaningful regulation.

“We call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4,” the letter reads, published in March. It adds that AI could have “potentially catastrophic” effects on society.