Musk’s high-profile official announcement of xAI: The top AI team sits in the city, and the Chinese gods gather. The goal is to unlock the "essence of the universe"?

Text: Juny Editor: VickyXiao

Musk's "X Universe" has added a new member today-xAI.

Of course, as the leader who has been criticizing and resisting the wave of generative AI represented by OpenAI, Musk's high-profile entry into AI is naturally taking an unusual path.

What exactly is xAI going to do with AI? Musk said it was to understand reality (understand reality), and the official homepage of xAI currently has only one sentence - xAI's goal is to understand the true nature of the universe (understand the true nature of the universe).

Image via Twitter

Unlike Microsoft and Google's recent direct launch of chatbots and the practical style of various product use cases, Musk's xAI this time is quite "metaphysical".

In the face of everyone's questions about xAI, he just said that "once you know the right question to ask, the answer is usually the easiest part." When answering whether AI is conscious, he mentioned quarks, leptons and aliens, It also issued a soul torture of "what is the meaning of life".

In addition, Musk once again mentioned his beloved number "42". He replied with a picture on xAI's official Twitter, saying that the sum of the release dates of xAI is exactly equal to 42. "42" refers to "the ultimate answer to life, the universe and everything" in Douglas Adams' science fiction novel "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", and is widely used by science fiction fans to pay tribute.

Image via Twitter

**｜High-profile anti-AI fighter, what do you want to use AI this time? **

Prior to this, Musk's reservations about artificial intelligence had long been a public matter. He has repeatedly called artificial intelligence a dangerous technology in public, took the lead in publishing an open letter to suspend AI research, angered Open AI, and even threatened to sue Microsoft.

Although he is an anti-AI fighter, Musk has been quietly engaging in AI since the beginning of this year. In fact, there are already traces to follow. Since February this year, it was revealed that Musk has been looking for talents in the field of artificial intelligence, and plans to recruit an artificial intelligence research and development team to form a new laboratory. At that time, it was reported that the direct purpose of this laboratory was to develop with ChatGPT. compete.

Immediately afterwards, a document from the state of Nevada in the United States showed that Musk incorporated X.AI on March 9. **Musk is a director and Jared Birchall, who runs the Musk family office, is listed as the company secretary.

At the beginning of April this year, Musk purchased 10,000 GPUs for Twitter. At that time, everyone speculated that these GPUs were being used to promote a brand new AI project of Twitter, most likely developing their own large language model.

Judging from today's xAI company announcement, the xAI established by Musk is not for Twitter services, nor does it seem to be benchmarking against OpenAI. **xAI will exist as an independent member of the Musk X Group, but it may also cooperate and link with other companies such as Twitter and Tesla in the future. **

Picture from xAI official homepage

xAI said that more announcements about information and interactions with the team will be held at the Twitter Space event on Friday (July 14th) (Silicon Stars will also continue to follow up**). **

This wave of operations is a two-pronged approach to stimulate the market's appetite and attract Twitter. It has to be said that Musk's title of "the strongest marketing master on the surface" is really not a vain name. After announcing the establishment of xAI, some netizens pretended to be Musk and stepped on Zuckerberg, who was recently proud of himself on Threads, and said that he hoped he would not plagiarize again this time.

｜The young AI academic team sits in town, and Chinese researchers account for one-third

Looking at the entire mysterious xAI project, perhaps the most informative part at present is its research team. On the xAI official homepage with only one page, the information of 12 main researchers of xAI is listed, and there are also Chinese researchers among them.

The xAI team is led by Musk, and the other 11 team members are from DeepMind, OpenAI, Google Research Institute, Microsoft Research Institute, Tesla, University of Toronto, etc. The members are very young as a whole, and the team members are located in Silicon Valley, Canada, and the United Kingdom. and so on.

Picture from xAI official homepage

Among the 12 people, there are 4 ** Chinese researchers, namely Yuhuai Wu, Greg Yang, Guodong Zhang and Zihang Dai. **

Among them, Dr. Yuhuai Wu graduated from the University of Toronto and then studied for a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University. Greg Yang graduated from Harvard University and then worked at Microsoft Research. Guodong Zhang graduated from Zhejiang University and then studied for a master's and doctoral degree at the University of Toronto. Zihang Dai Graduated from Tsinghua University with a bachelor's degree, and a post-doctorate degree from Carnegie Mellon University and worked at Google Research.

In addition to these four young Chinese researchers, the xAI team members also include: Igor Babuschkin and Manuel Kroiss, both of whom are senior researchers in the DeepMind AI department. Igor Babuschkin also worked at Open AI before and was a member of the ChatGPT project team a member of. In March this year, it was reported that the two had been poached by Musk to Twitter.

Christian Szegedy is from Google, Toby Pohlen is from DeepMind, Jimmy Ba is a star young associate professor at the University of Toronto, Ross Nordeen is from Tesla, and Kyle Kosic is from OpenAI.

The team is currently advised by fellow researcher Dan Hendrycks, who currently directs the Center for Artificial Intelligence Safety, a nonprofit that aims to "reduce risks at the societal scale associated with artificial intelligence."

In the team introduction of xAI, the important technologies and methods in the current AI field that the members of the team participated in and contributed to were linked, expressing their commitment to research and leading some breakthrough developments in the AI field, including AlphaStar, AlphaCode, Inception, Minerva , GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, etc.

**According to the xAI official page, xAI is currently actively recruiting excellent engineers and AI researchers. **

Picture from xAI official homepage

｜Netizens who don’t know what’s going on, play memes first

Although everyone still has no idea what xAI is doing, Musk's slogan of "exploring the nature of the universe" has undoubtedly aroused everyone's interest.

Some of Musk's "die-hard fans" hastened to create a "support map", saying that the emergence of xAI will be a blow to OpenAI's dimensionality reduction.

Image via Twitter

Some people also designed Musk's "X Building" early.

Image via Twitter

Of course, a cool company logo designed for xAI is also indispensable.

Image via Twitter

In view of the fact that after Zuckerberg launched Threads recently, Musk angrily denounced Meta’s confrontation of plagiarism, some people have also begun to tease Zuckerberg that he must be listening to the corner again now.

Image via Twitter

Of course, some people in the world also questioned Musk’s exaggeration. The goal of xAI sounds very exciting and unconventional. In fact, it may end up just launching a product similar to a chat robot. **After all, Tesla's fully self-driving Musk has been swearing for almost 5 years.

So, what kind of technology and products will xAI launch to help us understand the essence of the universe, and what exactly is the essence of the universe that Musk said? We'll be waiting for the answer on Friday's Twitter Space.