Elon Musk just created his own AI company

Despite Elon Musk’s public opposition to advanced AI development due to its potential risks to society, he has taken several steps pointing to a larger AI project. 

The most recent is that Musk created his own AI company. 

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As first reported by The Wall Street Journal, a Nevada state filing made last month reveals that Musk created a company called X.AI Corp. Musk is listed as the sole director of the company, which has authorized the sale of 100 million shares. 

The name of this AI company relates to Twitter’s new company name, X Corp. Both of the X references in the AI company’s name and Twitter’s new name trace back to Elon’s longtime plan for “X, the everything app.” 

The “everything app” would resemble WeChat or Grab in Asia, multi-faceted apps that serve as a one-stop shop for most users’ needs. 

Alongside the shift to the brand X, Musk has recently purchased 10,000 graphic processing units (GPUs) for Twitter, which are crucial for machine learning models, a sign of a potential generative AI project on the horizon. 

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To further confirm the possibility of an AI project in the works, Musk hired new AI talent — engineers Igor Babuschkin and Manuel Kroiss — in early March. 

If you connect all the different things Musk has worked on recently, they point to larger projects that relate to each other — perhaps the arrival of the long-expected “X, the everything app” with AI components.