Elon Musk, the billionaire entrepreneur and CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, is reportedly developing plans to launch a new artificial intelligence (AI) start-up that will compete with OpenAI, the company behind the popular language model ChatGPT. Musk has assembled a team of AI researchers and engineers and secured thousands of high-powered Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) from Nvidia, which are essential for building large language models capable of producing human-like writing or realistic imagery. Musk's potential entry into the generative AI market has raised eyebrows in some corners of the AI community, given that he previously led a letter calling for a pause on the development of GPT-style models over safety concerns.
Musk's new venture will add to his already diverse portfolio of responsibilities and investments, which include running Twitter and Tesla, founding SpaceX, Neuralink, and The Boring Company. According to sources with knowledge of his plans, Musk began exploring the idea of a rival AI company earlier this year in response to the rapid progress of OpenAI. He has recruited engineers from top AI labs including DeepMind and has already brought on board Igor Babuschkin, a former DeepMind employee, and roughly half a dozen other engineers.
The new company will allow Musk to take on OpenAI, the Microsoft-backed group that he co-founded in 2015, but left the board three years later amid clashes with its management over attitudes to AI safety. Since then, Musk has become increasingly vocal about his fears of broader existential threats from AI systems, and has publicly criticised OpenAI for becoming less transparent and too commercially minded in its pursuit of advanced AI. Musk is particularly concerned about the threat of models like GPT-4 to spew falsehoods and show political bias.
Musk's new AI venture is separate from his other companies, although it could use Twitter content as data to train its language model and tap Tesla for computing resources. While the exact position of the AI team in Musk's corporate empire remains unclear, he recently moved Twitter Inc, which he bought for $44bn last year, into a new holding company, X Corp.
Musk's new venture will enter an increasingly crowded and well-financed market, with tech giants Microsoft, Google, and Amazon competing with start-ups such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Adept, and StabilityAI, who have together raised billions of dollars in recent months.
When Musk left OpenAI in 2018, the public explanation for the split was that he wanted to focus on Tesla, which was also investing heavily in AI. However, people involved in OpenAI at the time of his departure say that Musk clashed with other board members and staffers over differences in their choices regarding AI safety.
In conclusion, Elon Musk's entry into the generative AI market with a new start-up that will compete with OpenAI highlights the growing importance of AI in today's tech landscape. The move will undoubtedly attract attention and scrutiny from the AI community, given Musk's previous calls for caution and safety in AI development. Nonetheless, Musk's new venture, with its team of talented AI researchers and engineers, has the potential to make a significant impact on the future of AI, and we look forward to seeing its progress.
input from// FT
