Reports are coming out that Elon Musk has started a new AI company called X.ai to compete with the likes of Google, OpenAI, and others. Elon Musk was one of the co-founders of OpenAI in 2015 when he and other Silicon Valley tech leaders decided to start an AI company.
This was to act as a counterbalance to others within the market such as the big players like Google who could have a monopoly on the market if they are the ones to control the core technology and shape the industry.
Elon Musk saw this as a threat to the world because artificial intelligence is a powerful technology. If it is in the hands of a few companies that can be a bit dangerous due to the power and influence that company can have.
OpenAI started off as none profit and later became a for-profit company in 2019 with a $1 billion dollar investment from Microsoft, a year after Elon Musk had left the company.
The departure of Elon Musk wasn’t as smooth as everyone thought, there were a lot of internal battles going on and from a CEO of Elon’s stature, internal politics can drain a lot of energy and focus, hence he chose to double down on Tesla and SpaceX. Since Elon Left the company, OpenAI has been iterating on its machine-learning models and the rewards are now paying off.
Late last year they launched ChatGPT which has turned out to be a massive success. Microsoft further invested another $10 billion into the company which further cemented its influence over the company.
This success has caught the eyes of key tech players, now we are caught in an AI race among the top tech companies and Elon Musk doesn’t want to feel left out. That’s why X.ai was born. There have been rumors that he has been purchasing a lot of GPU cards to train these models
It’s going to be interesting to see if this project will become a success, one thing is for sure that we have learned over the years is to not bet against Elon Musk.
