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

Without warning, Musk just announced on Twitter--

The goal of establishing the company xAI is to understand the true nature of the universe.

More information was revealed by founding team members that xAI, most likely also anchors large model areas:

The development of "theory of everything" for large-scale neural networks will become the core point for AI to take it to a new level.

Together with the appearance of the founding team, including Musk, a total of 12 people.

According to xAI's website, the light cavalry, led by Musk, consists of leaders cited by Google academic more than 200000, as well as members of ChatGPT's project team, participants behind AlphaStar, co-authors of Transformer-XL, and so on.

They have worked for companies such as OpenAI, DeepMind, Microsoft and Tesla, as well as academic institutions such as the University of Toronto.

Moreover, the Chinese have occupied a number of seats and attracted a lot of attention.

Each of them's Twitter is followed by the eye-catching xAI company logo icon.

With such battles, it is no wonder that some netizens are "surprised" to share their new discoveries:

Oh ho, this is an AI start-up with 100% employees using Twitter!

Although Musk will lead the team, xAI will be an independent company.

However, the team will still work closely with other companies under Boss Ma, such as X (Twitter), Tesla, SpaceX and so on.

The news came so suddenly that it not only caught OpenAI, Anthropic and other companies by surprise, but even the onlookers were excited.

As a result of being ordered by the same boss, Twitter employees are excited to join the party:

A friend of mine asked me to ask if he could work on both Twitter and xAI. (doge)

Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, also spoke that he thought Musk was very capable of promoting the development of AI.

However, Hoffman is also a former board member of OpenAI and a co-founder of Inflection AI, a hugely popular AI startup.

In the face of this situation, he could not help asking his doubts:

That is to say, when Musk himself ended up trying to speed up the development of AI, I kind of wondered what his original intention was to suspend the development of global AI for six months.

Chinese account for the founding team list 1/3 xAI is too simple (only one page) on the official website, the most interesting is the list of 12 people.

Qubit also noticed that many of the 12 people were Chinese.

Including Yuhuai (Tony) Wu, Greg Yang, Guodong Zhang and Zihang Dai, etc.

Wu Yuhuai Yuhuai (Tony) Wu, a postdoctoral student at Stanford University, graduated from the University of Toronto

Greg Yang Young, graduated from Harvard and worked in Microsoft Research.

Zhang Guodong, Guodong Zhang, graduated with a master's degree from the University of Toronto. He was a student of Zhejiang University as an undergraduate.

Dai Zihang Zihang Dai studied at Tsinghua University and CMU successively. After graduating with his PhD, he worked at Google Research.

Jimmy Ba, an associate professor at the University of Toronto, studied under Turing Award winner Hinton and is also the developer of the Adam optimizer.

Let's take a look at how the official website of xAI introduces the past experiences of these 12 people.

The whole team is led by Musk himself.

The rest of the founding team members have worked at DeepMind, OpenAI, Googel Research, Microsoft Research, Tesla and the University of Toronto.

These people have played team leadership roles or made academic contributions to Transformer-XL,Autoformalization,the Memorizing Transformer,Batch Size Scaling,and μ Transfer.

The projects in their hands are AlphaStar,AlphaCode,Inception,Minerva,GPT-3.5, GPT-4 and so on.

More information was not revealed on the official website.

Qubits explored their resumes before joining xAI and briefly combed them in the light of previous experiences.

(there are only 11 founding team members, whom Musk will not elaborate on in this article).

Former OpenAI employee: 1 person

Former Kyle Kosic,OpenAI engineer with research interests in automation, scalability and distributed computing.

Looking ahead, he worked for OnScale, a company that makes simulated cloud platforms.

Three months ago, Kyle was passionately forwarding ChatGPT Plugin's dynamic articles on Linkedin.

Former DeepMind employees: 4

A total of four people on the founding team of xAI were full-time employees of DeepMind.

Zhang Guodong, a former DeepMind research scientist, is one of the xAI Chinese faces.

After graduating from Zhejiang University with a bachelor's degree in information engineering, he received his doctorate from the University of Toronto and worked as an intern at Google brain and Microsoft Research. The main research interests are ML and AI, which are currently focused on training, tuning and aligning large language models.

He has published papers at ICML, ICLR and NeurIPS computer international conferences.

Igor Babuschkin, a person who jumps repeatedly in DeepMind and OpenAI.

He has worked at DeepMind for more than 3 years since 2018 and is one of the lead authors of the paper AlphaStar (DeepMind StarCraft AI Model) published in "Nature".

Then he moved to OpenAI.

According to reports, during this period, Igor is a member of the ChatGPT project team.

But last April, he returned to DeepMind as a senior chief engineer.

Manuel Kroiss, like the one above, is also a former senior researcher in the DeepMind AI department.

It was reported in March this year that Musk poached the man to Twitter and did not expect that the final destination would be xAI.

Toby Pohlen, has been practicing in DeepMind for 6 years and 3 months.

During his tenure, he developed an evaluation system for AlphaStar to participate in the league-AlphaStar is an AI developed by DeepMind and can play StarCraft II. His performance in three games was rated as a master, ranking in the top 99.8% of the official human player rankings.

According to Linkedin data, from 2021, Toby's work has shifted to services and evaluation tools dedicated to large language models.

Former Microsoft employee: 1 person

Yang GE was the chief software engineer at Microsoft Raymond Research before leaving office.

Prior to that, he also had jobs at Apple (2019.4-2021.2) and Google (2013.9-2018.10).

His main industry experience focuses on building, launching, and maintaining large distributed systems and infrastructure components for TensorPrograms and neuralnetworks. There is in-depth research.

So far, he is the only one who has marked "xAI Co-creation" on his Twitter profile.

After the establishment of the xAI official announcement, Yang GE said:

The development of the "theory of everything" of large-scale neural networks will be the core of taking artificial intelligence to a new level.

On the other hand, this AI will enable everyone to understand our mathematical universe in ways that were previously unimaginable.

Former Google employees: 3

Of the 12 people, three left their final footprints at Google before joining xAI.

Christian Szegedy, a former research scientist at Google Research.

He invented one of the earliest target detection algorithms, adversarial examples, which mainly works for deep learning and is dedicated to ML, AI and CV through deep learning.

On Google Shcolar, the boss's total quotation exceeded 200000.

Dai Zihang, one of the Chinese faces of xAI, has studied at Tsinghua University and CMU.

After graduating from the doctorate, he works at Google Research. Is a former research scientist at Google.

His resume also shows that he worked in deep learning at Baidu and later spent some time at MILA, the AI lab led by Yoshua Bengio, a Turing Award winner and one of the Big three in Deep Learning.

In 2019, in CMU's pre-training model work XLNet, Dai Zihang and Yang Zhilin, now assistant professor of Tsinghua Fork Institute and founder of the dark side of domestic AI start-up company, were listed as a joint work.

Wu Yuhuai, one of the Chinese faces of xAI, graduated from the University of Toronto with a PhD and went to Stanford University to do a post-doctoral career.

His main research interest is to make machines that can reason, and his goal is to be a mathematician about automation.

It is worth mentioning that one of Wu Yuhuai's mentors is Jimmy Ba, another member of the founding team.

He worked as an intern at DeepMind and OpenAI, and joined Google's N2Formal team after graduation.

Last year, three papers he participated in were published at ICLR 2022, and eight were accepted by NeurIPS 2022.

Former employee of Tesla: 1 person

Ross Nordeen, former technical project manager of Tesla supercomputing and machine learning department.

Before joining xAI, the media reported that Ross had been "transferred" to Twitter by Musk in October last year to manage some recruitment and visits.

University of Toronto faculty: 1 person

Jimmy Ba, a star young associate professor at the University of Toronto, completed his master's degree at the University of Toronto and won his doctorate with Turing Award winner Geoffrey Hinton.

The research of Jimmy Ba focuses on the development of efficient learning algorithms for deep neural networks and is one of the preferred algorithms for training deep learning models. It is the developer of Adam optimizer.

At the beginning of this year, he won the Sloan Research Award, known as the "Nobel Vane".

The interesting thing is that his Twitter profile reads:

All my posts are generated by GPT.

Musk started a big model OpenAI+DeepMind + Microsoft + Google + Tesla + University of Toronto, it can be said that the AI buff of the founding team of xAI is full!

In view of the projects that xAI team members have been involved in, many netizens have speculated that the establishment of xAI is Musk's entry into the big model and the horn of AIGC, competing fiercely with OpenAI.

After a series of bombings in OpenAI earlier this year, Musk has been talking again and again.

On the one hand, it is co-signed with more than 1000 big names, such as Yoshua Bengio, Stability AI's CEO, DeepMind researchers, and so on, demanding that GPT training be suspended for at least six months.

On the other hand, keep saying that OpenAI is no longer Open, saying that it will launch an AI platform called TruthGPT, and claiming that "this may be the best way to security."

Speaking of which, xAI is the sixth company Musk is currently leading, and the other five are Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter, Neuralink and Boring Co.

It is clearly written in black and white on the official website that xAI is an independent company, but it will cooperate deeply with SpaceX, Twitter and so on.

So what on earth is this new AI star created by Musk?

In Musk's words, it is to understand reality (understand reality), which can be further understood through another sentence on the official website:

In order to understand the true nature of the universe (understand the true nature of the universe).

More matters have not been made public so far, xAI has sold a link, and you are welcome to ask questions directly to the team during the Twitter Space chat on July 14, local time (Friday).

Conscientious people have secretly found out more information about xAI.

For example, on March 9 this year, Musk registered xAI as a company, and Musk became a director himself.

It was registered and established at the beginning of March, why did you choose today's official declaration?

Musk saw that no one was talking in this direction, so he dug up the burden he had buried.

There is only one reason, and that is that he is playing tricks. After all, "42 is the ultimate answer to the universe."

Back to the point, the point in time when March was established is a little more subtle.

Some netizens have speculated that the 10,000 GPU Musk bought for Twitter in early April may have been secretly preparing for the development of his own big language model after the establishment of xAI.

Nvidia AI scientist Jimmy Fan, who is forever on the front line of AI eating melons, tweeted and analyzed a wave:

There is a lot of multimodal data on conversational texts, images, long videos and Twitter.

XAI is the only AI startup that has direct, legal and reasonable access to this huge, daily expanding corpus!

By the way, in addition to the founding 12, there is also a personal name on xAI's website: corporate consultant Dan Hendricks (Dan Hendrycks).

He is also the director of the Center for artificial Intelligence Security (Center for AI Safety), an international AI nonprofit that released a 22-word open letter on May 30 this year.

This is what the letter says:

Mitigating the risk of human extinction caused by artificial intelligence should be a global priority along with other large-scale risks affecting societies such as pandemics and nuclear wars.

I do not know whether the addition of this person can avoid the problems that Musk has been saying that "the rapid development of AI brings risks" and so on.

After the official announcement of One More Thing Musk, xAI has opened chat posts and started chatting with netizens.

But at the end of Twitter, which hosts the debut of xAI, something similar to crazy is happening.

Recently, Twitter has not only been caught up in a dispute over current restrictions, but has also been fed into a lawsuit for claims--

Musk laid off thousands of employees after he bought Twitter last year.

In principle, these employees should receive a total of at least $500 million in severance pay, but Twitter not only failed to pay enough according to the company's internal regulations since 2019, but only gave the laid-off person a month's severance pay at most. Some people didn't even pull a penny out of Twitter.

Last month, notice of the lawsuit fell on Twitter, and the company failed to pay millions of dollars in bonuses owed to employees.

Twitter said it was "unreasonable to sue me".

Emmmm... Probably only after working with Musk to "understand the true nature of the universe" can we understand why Twitter does not pay severance payment in accordance with its own rules.

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