When OpenAI decided to charge $42 for its ChatGPT, things did not go as planned. But, Musk seems to have cracked Code 42. He launched xAI on July 12, which when added, (7+12+23 = 42) gives the answer to the universe. Philosophy aside, if we trace the timeline of Musk’s decisions, they had all been hinting at his desire to own an AI company.

Musk bought Twitter last year and keeping in line with his aspiration to build what he calls ‘X, the everything app‘, he renamed Twitter Inc to X Corp in April. In that same month, Elon Musk made the decision to discontinue the free API access to Twitter. This move came as he recognised that developers were scraping data from the platform, which they could then use to train their own language models (LLMs).

This strategic move came in the wake of Musk’s desire to develop his own chatbot named ‘TruthGPT.’ The anticipation surrounding xAI and its upcoming revelations highlights Musk’s continued dedication to pushing the boundaries of artificial intelligence and his ambition to delve into the depths of understanding reality. xAI’s website states that its mission is to “understand reality”, and it proudly reveals that it consists of a talented team of engineers hailing from renowned US tech giants such as Google, OpenAI, and Microsoft. 

The xAI website says, “We are a separate company from X Corp, but will work closely with X (Twitter), Tesla, and other companies to make progress towards our mission.” The website highlights the suitability of Twitter’s conversation data for training large language models, such as the one powering ChatGPT. xAI will be advised by Dan Hendrycks, who currently serves as the director of the Center for AI Safety.

Meanwhile, Tesla’s expertise in designing specialised AI chips and building robust computing clusters for AI applications could potentially enhance xAI’s cloud computing capabilities. In addition to that, Financial Times reported earlier this year that Musk bought 10,000 GPUs from Nvidia for use at one of the company’s two remaining data centres. Additionally, as Tesla ventures into the development of a humanoid robot, there is potential for collaboration and mutual benefit between xAI and Tesla’s project in the future.

Musk had been actively reaching out to AI researchers since February of this year with the goal of establishing a new research lab. The lab’s objective was to create an alternative to ChatGPT, the popular language model. As part of this initiative, Musk successfully recruited Igor Babuschkin, a senior staff research engineer who had recently left DeepMind. Not surprisingly, Babuschkin is now a member of the xAI team. Earlier this year, they had discussions about forming a team dedicated to AI research and product development which aligns with the endeavours of xAI.

Is Musk late? 

The xAI name and its vision  to ‘understand reality’ creates an essence of mystery. It seems that Musk is trying to cover up the fact that he is behind his competitors by creating a bizarre hype around xAI. Musk even started a thread on Twitter asking followers “What are the most fundamental unanswered questions?” Is this a marketing gimmick or Musk seriously looking for answers? For now, it seems like a plot to undermine his rivals ChatGPT, Bard and Claude 2 as he is far behind in the race. 

Time is slipping out of Musk’s hands as Zuckerberg also played his card by launching Threads. Zuckerberg knows there is something powerful behind the idea of training a chatbot based on a social network’s data. The goal of building an alternative to Twitter has possibly now turned into building an alternative to OpenAI.

Surprisingly, Musk accepted that. On Twitter Space discussion on Wednesday he mentioned  “xAI is really just kind of starting out here, it will be a while before it’s relevant on the scale of OpenAI Microsoft AI or Google DeepMind AI. Those are really the two big gorillas in the Ai right now by far.” 

In March, Musk had urged artificial intelligence labs to pause development of the most advanced systems, warning in an open letter that AI tools present “profound risks to society and humanity”. Now it makes sense why he did that. It was a strategic move to ensure his competitors remained mindful of the potential consequences and to maintain a check on the progress being made in the field so that he could catch up with them. 

Summing up 

When Musk bought Twitter in October, last year, many criticised the move and wrote him off from the tech ecosystem. Nobody was sure about his motive of spending $44 billion on the microblogging platform. Nine months later, things are slowly falling in place. The announcement of xAI hints towards the ultimate goal of Twitter acquisition.