Elon Musk apparently isn’t busy enough with Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter, The Boring Company and Neuralink on his plate, he’s now kicked off company number 6 known as X.AI.
His latest venture has been in the works for a while, but yesterday officially got its own website with the sexy, short domain name of X.AI.
We know very little about X.AI, the official mission statement on the website is ‘The goal of xAI is to understand the true nature of the universe.’
That statement is incredibly vague and doesn’t at all indicate what are the priorities for the company. Having a broad scope does come with plenty of opportunities to explore different areas of AI.
Tesla already leverages AI heavily as part of the development of their autonomous driving software package – Full Self Driving). Tesla investors will certainly be keen to understand how much AI development will happen at Tesla, compared to the new company X.AI.
There are often benefits shared between Musk-owned companies like the material science talent from SpaceX helping develop new allows for the Gigacasting, a critical development for Tesla to reduce costs in production. Given Tesla has a large GPU cluster and is now scaling out its own Dojo training compute, it will be interesting what arrangement will be in place between Tesla and X.AI.
Will X.AI buy Dojo chips from Tesla and build their own training infrastructure or lease time on Tesla’s already significant training cluster? If X.Ai was to borrow compute time from Tesla, this would need to be paid for, and we’d need to hear how this works, given that could create potential delays in Tesla reaching higher levels of autonomy.
There are questions back the other way as well, what if X.AI develops some amazing technology, will Tesla need to buy that or pay for a service from X.AI? And where does Twitter fit into the equation? If I was going to train a large language model, Twitter would make a pretty great data source, with geographic and language diversity, as well as a long history of content. Will X.AI pay Twitter for API access or get it for free because they have the same owner.
The site provides just one statement on this, ‘We are a separate company from X Corp, but will work closely with X (Twitter), Tesla, and other companies to make progress towards our mission.’
It is easy to imagine possibilities for the use of AI inside Musk-led companies, one example would be a restaurant recommendation engine when travelling in the Tesla. Another would be to calculate the optimal charging locations to prioritise travel time or the lowest cost. As we move closer to a world with robotaxis, understanding and accommodating the supply and demand curves that constantly change would enable the lowest total cost per mile or kilometre, optimising the locations of cars relative to people and events.
The X.AI Team
With the launch of the website for X.AI comes, we learn there are currently just 16 staff members some of the team from OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research, Tesla, and the University of Toronto.
Collectively the members of X.AI have contributed some of the most widely used methods in the field. Having 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, they clearly feel well-positioned to create a competitor.
X.AI are currently recruiting and if you’re in the San Francisco Bay Area, you can apply here.
The first 12 employees may not be names you are familiar with today, but prepare for that to change. I’ve included links to their Twitter profiles so you can follow them if you’re into AI, this is probably a smart thing to do.
- Elon Musk (@elonmusk)
- Igor Babuschkin (@ibab_ml)
- Manuel Kroiss (@makro_ai)
- Yuhuai (Tony) Wu (@Yuhu_ai_)
- Christian Szegedy (@ChrSzegedy)
- Jimmy Ba (@jimmybajimmyba)
- Toby Pohlen (@TobyPhln)
- Ross Nordeen (@rpoo)
- Kyle Kosic (@kylekosic)
- Greg Yang (@TheGregYang)
- Guodong Zhang (@Guodzh)
- Zihang Dai (@ZihangDai)
Twitter Space
There will be a Twitter Space with the X.AI team tomorrow that will hopefully answer many questions we all have about the company. The Space is scheduled for 1PM Pacific Time (PT) which translates to 6:30AM tomorrow (Sat 15th July) in Australian Eastern Standard Time (AEST).
