Elon Musk, Tesla and SpaceX’s boss and billionaire entrepreneur, launched his long-teased artificial intelligence startup xAI, unveiling a team comprised of engineers from the same big U.S. technology firms that he hopes to challenge in his bid to build an alternative to ChatGPT.

The new company is called xAI, and includes several engineers that have worked at companies like OpenAI and Google.

Mr. Musk has previously stated he believes developments in AI should be paused and that the sector needs regulation.

He said the start-up was created to “understand reality”.

It is unclear how much funding the entity has, what its specific objectives are or what kind of artificial intelligence the company wants to focus on.

The company’s website says the goal of xAI is to “understand the true nature of the universe.”

The new firm will host a Twitter Spaces chat on Friday, which may reveal further details about its aims.

Elon Musk was one of the original backers of OpenAI, which went on to create the popular large language model ChatGPT, which has – often controversially – become popular for uses such as assisting students with writing homework.

Musk disagrees with how ChatGPT has been run – and its close relationship with Microsoft.

in an interview in April, Mr. Musk said he had been worrying about AI safety for over a decade.

he said, “I think there should be a regulatory body established for overseeing AI to make sure that it does not present a danger to the public”.

Mr. Musk has also pitted himself against AI companies due to the data they use to train chatbots – the software that learns how humans interact by scraping masses of data from various sources to fuel its knowledge and interaction styles.

Musk was one of the tech leaders who earlier this year called for AI developers to agree to a six-month pause before building systems more powerful than OpenAI’s latest model, GPT-4. Around the same time, he had already been working to start his own AI company, according to Nevada business records.

(ref-bbc)