Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Elon Musk is planning to launch an artificial intelligence start-up to compete with ChatGPT, a report confirmed by Musk.

He said he was going to start a project called TruthGPT, an AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe and maximize the search for truth.

In early March, Musk registered and founded a company called X.AI in Nevada, where he is the only registered director and whose secretary is Jared Birchall, a former Morgan Stanley banker. The secretary is CEO of Neuralink, Musk's brain-computer interface company, and a director of Musk's family office and tunnel-digging company Boring.

Musk is soliciting investment for the new company and has communicated with some investors in Tesla and SpaceX, and has attracted some interest, according to a person familiar with the matter.

In addition to the investment, the technical team of the new company is also being built. As of March, Musk had hired two engineers who had worked at DeepMind, Google's sister AI company. Among them, Igor Babuschkin, who is in charge, has not only DeepMind resume, but also the experience of working in OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. People familiar with the matter said Musk is still trying to poach people from OpenAI, but so far to no avail.

Musk has a deeper relationship with OpenAI-he is a member of the founding team.

Musk and OpenAI: from founding member to kicker, Musk co-founded OpenAI with Sam Altman, then president of US startup incubator Y Combinator, in 2015, when OpenAI was a non-profit organization.

However, Musk resigned from the OpenAI board in 2018, arguing publicly that his family, Tesla, also required a lot of AI research to develop autopilot features, which had a potential conflict of interest with OpenAI.

Is the truth so simple? When Musk was still a director, he offered to be in charge of OpenAI and run it himself, but he was unanimously refused, and after leaving, he poached one of the talents of OpenAI, Andrej Karpathy, to Tesla.

Some OpenAI employees at the time said that Musk and the company also disagreed on the choice of AI security. Some employees also said that Musk's withdrawal from the board was the highest morale moment of the year.

After ChatGPT became popular, Musk also launched many times on the Internet.

Musk criticized OpenAI on Twitter, saying it was founded as an open source, not-for-profit company, so the name "Open" was used to check and balance Google. But now it has become a closed-source, profit-maximizing company controlled by Microsoft, which runs counter to Musk's original intention. He added: "I even donated $100 million."

In addition to targeting OpenAI, Musk signed an open letter with thousands of technology leaders, calling on all laboratories to suspend more advanced AI system training than GPT-4 for at least half a year.

The reason given by them is mainly in the aspect of security, saying that this AI intelligent system, which can compete with human beings, may pose a threat to society and human beings, so a safety standard should be established first.

OpenAI CEO Altman responded by agreeing that safety standards need to be improved, but the request to suspend research and development lacks technical details.

Although Musk is ostensibly opposed to GPT's in-depth research, he privately bought about 10, 000 high-performance GPU processors, the high-end chips needed to train to build large language models.

When asked this question on Twitter Spaces recently, Musk did not answer directly, but said, "it seems that they are all buying GPU now, and Tesla and Twitter are also buying it." Then, Boss Ma recommended Tesla's Dojo supercomputer and hinted that Dojo could become a server infrastructure like the Amazon cloud.

Musk's X Empire, Musk had a long affection for the name "X" during the integration. In 1999, he started an online banking company called X.com and later merged with rival Confinity to form PayPal. He also has a son named X, who was born with Canadian singer Grimes, 17 years younger than him.

Musk has also publicly stated that the acquisition of Twitter is an "accelerator" to create the everything App (Universal App). Musk has praised Wechat more than once from the bottom of his heart, judging from the changes he has made to Twitter, developing the stream of recommendation information, and increasing his financial business.

On the size and completeness of Wechat, Musk once said: "if we can reproduce this with Twitter, we will be a great success."

It is unclear what role X.AI will play in Musk's corporate portfolio. Perhaps Musk will integrate resources and use X.AI to enhance autopilot; a link with the Twitter he bought last year is a high probability.

What is known is that he set up a shell company called X and merged Twitter, which also has a parent company called X Holdings.

People familiar with Musk's ideas say X.AI can use Twitter content as data to train language models, as well as Tesla's computing resources.

In contrast, at the end of last year, a month after the launch of ChatGPT, Musk, who had become Twitter's boss, suspended OpenAI's access to Twitter data training, which had previously been open.

Compared to OpenAI's closed source, X.AI will be open source, which means that everyone can contribute to the code and build on it, and will increase transparency, especially in the context of technology companies weakening AI's ethics team.

One challenge Musk will face is that large-scale language model training consumes a lot of already inadequate electricity and water resources. Professors at the University of California and the University of Texas pointed out in a paper: "ChatGPT needs to 'drink' a 500ml bottle of water to have a simple conversation of about 20-50 questions and answers."

In addition to resources, there is also the cost of money-the more powerful the AI model, the higher its operating costs. According to Fortune magazine, OpenAI expects its cost to be about $544.5 million in 2022. Musk also authorized the sale of 100 million shares in the company to finance X.AI.

In order to reduce costs, technology giants such as Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft, the financier of OpenAI, have all begun a long way to develop their own internal chips.

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